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“... Most writers​ she knows, Maggie Nelson writes, ‘nurse persistent fantasies about the horrible things – or the horrible thing – that will happen to them if and when they express themselves as they desire’. Everywhere she goes – ‘especially if I’m in drag as a “memoirist”’ – such fears appear to be uppermost in everybody’s mind ...”

“... Why​ is Maggie Nelson writing this way, I wondered, after reading the first pages of her new book, On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint. Nelson has written cultural criticism before, but she is better known for her memoirs The Argonauts and The Red Parts, existential inquiries that describe her experiences of sex, childbirth and violence while also drawing on cultural theory and philosophy ...”

“... can be traced to Guest’s influence. In Women, the New York School and Other True Abstractions, Maggie Nelson tries to rectify this omission, but the differences between Guest and the later poets she profiles – Bernadette Mayer, Alice Notley and Eileen Myles – so far outweigh any similarities that it again threatens the whole fragile concept of the ...”

“... how jealous he was she got to feel a dick inside her. The prose has gone into poetry drag. Like Maggie Nelson or Carmen Maria Machado, Lawlor is interested in blending styles and genres – or, perhaps more accurately, refuses to be confined by genre boundaries. As Polly, Paul does things Paul wouldn’t do; he cries easily, for example. He feels ...”

“... had opted for a wife, and a wife she was, no less or more’), recalls an old flame, Maggie, and an earlier life of real and desired adulteries: ‘Driving back from taking the babysitter home, Frank would pass darkened houses where husbands he knew were lying in bed, head to murmuring head, with wives he coveted.’ (One relishes the kitschy way ...”

“... reveals, it’s the troubling fact that you can be victimised and in no way be radical,’ as Maggie Nelson wrote in The Argonauts (the words in italics are Leo Bersani’s). It’s not to put down the love and care parents of all sorts give their children – my own parenting behaviour fits pretty much into the ‘eternally ...”

“... called Max Jacobson, referred to by celebrities who had his phone number – Marlene Dietrich, Nelson Rockefeller, John F. Kennedy – as Doctor Feelgood. Lahr identifies the ingredients in these ‘fire-shots’ as amphetamines, painkillers, vitamins and human placenta. Williams was trying to clear the fog in his brain, to call up some residue of the ...”

“... feel for hours with my next child – the certainty that I was dying.‘To let the baby out,’ Maggie Nelson writes, ‘you have to be willing to go to pieces.’ ‘Just this is miraculous,’ Carole Maso writes. ‘That I ploughed without illusion towards death. Even as I gave life.’ Not everyone describes birth as an encounter with death: there ...”

“... In an uncharacteristic moment of playfulness during her affair with Nelson Algren, Simone de Beauvoir called herself his ‘frog wife’. Although it echoed his tough-guy slang about their Paris-Chicago romance, the phrase has the ring of feminist fable. Like Hans Christian Andersen’s little mermaid, whose story Beauvoir wept over as a child, the frog wife is a changeling, unlike other women; pebbly and awkward, she cannot wed the prince ...”

“... had contained a sympathetic portrait of a damaged but vital woman, under the name of Martha. Lucy Nelson, the central figure of his next novel, When She Was Good (1967), is just as damaged but also perversely destructive of herself and others, no longer a valiant survivor. She freezes to death on a winter’s night, having driven away anyone who might care ...”

“... husband of one of her female lovers without the woman knowing. The publication of her letters to Nelson Algren in 1997 made the relationship she had with Sartre look passionless, as did the photo that emerged in 2008 of Beauvoir at 42, pinning her hair up in Algren’s bathroom wearing just a pair of heels. And her insistence that Sartre was the ...”