Reading Boyishly

by Carol Mavor

"An intricate text filled to the brim with connotations of desire, home, and childhood - nests, food, beds, birds, fairies, bits of string, ribbon, goodnight kisses, appetites sated and denied - Reading Boyishly is a story of mothers and sons, loss and longing, writing and photography. In this homage to four boyish men and one boy - J.M. Barrie, Roland Barthes, Marcel Proust, D.W. Winnicott, and the young photographer Jacques Henri Lartigue - Carol Mavor embraces what some have anxiously labeled an over-attachment to the mother. Here, the maternal is a cord (unsevered) to the night-light of boyish reading." "To "read boyishly" is to covet the mother s body as a home both lost and never lost, to desire her as only a son can, as only a body that longs for, but will never become Mother, can. Nostalgia (from the Greek nostos = return to native land, and algos = suffering or grief) is at the heart of the labor of boyish reading, which suffers in its love affair with the mother. The writers