about

hello! my name is h., any pronouns, 30s. you probably know me from boundwithpurple

if tumblr’s demise ever comes to pass, this will be primarily a fandom journal (house of the dragon and asoiaf primarily), as well as a place for me to talk about fic writing and what i’m reading more generally. as for non-fandom things, i mostly process other fixations through fandom on the internet, but i am a graduate student in medieval and early modern english literature and also am interested in: gothic literature/literary criticism and theory/feminist theory/sff but especially fantasy/medieval history and culture/historical queerness and transness/sex and sexuality and kink/trauma trauma studies trauma narratives etc.

links and tags: 

• boundwithpurple
• fic talk snippets etc - snippets from WIPs, dvd commentaries, plans, musings, etc
• readings - book reviews, quotes from what i’m reading, general literary chat, etc

(book) the lesser bohemians, eimear mcbride

tumblr might be dying for real this time! or not. to deal with my anxiety about losing the only fandom space/social media that has ever really worked for me, i started to think about how i could use dreamwidth to fill the hole it will leave, should this demise prove true. so i am going to try to gather together my thoughts about two novels i read recently, by collecting together my tumblr posts on them and trying to turn it into dreamwidth posts…

the lesser bohemians is a novel by irish writer eimear mcbride. i had a remarkable experience with this book (and its sequel which might be a different post). they have some incredibly specific and weird concerns i have tried to do in my writing in the last couple of years, so specific and weird i haven’t encountered anything that is preoccupied with them in exact combination. it felt like it was in conversation with my fanfiction, or reading my fanfiction back to me. providing a reading i never got from any reader itself, almost. those concerns are, roughly: 1) the structural demands of disclosure of childhood sexual abuse 2) age gap relationships as a way to turn up the dial on certain themes of dependency and need inherent in all bonds of love 3) unsettling substitutions for various emotional deprivations that mix the familial and the sexual (in this case, a daughterless father falling in love with a fatherless daughter the same age as his lost daughter).

i really think all writers of romantic fanfiction should read these books. they are doing simply incredible things with the question of how to write people falling in love as thrilling as falling in love can actually be (and in the second with creating tension within established relationships). like formally and linguistically dazzling but all in service of people falling in love and fucking like so much fucking half this book is sex and having emotional problems from their bad childhoods. my response to this heir to joycean experimental prose is i want to take it apart and put it back together to figure out how to do exactly this, in my fanfiction. under the cut i am going to try to bring together the more scattered form of the tumblr post to get at in the dauntingly more finished form of the dreamwidth post what i liked so much about it. a fittingly experimental attempt at a review, if you will.

( could i grow up in a night? )