In this collection of essays, Chelsea Hodson probes her own desires to examine where the physical and the proprietary collide. She asks what our privacy, our intimacy, and our own bodies are worth in the increasingly digital world of liking, linking, and sharing.
The collection’s greatest strength may be Hodson’s self-awareness. Writing of her desire to be 'fractional,' or not wholly seen, she joins a body of women writers whose subject is their own self-destruction as a means of escaping domestic ennui.... These lucid insights, and Hodson’s transfixing style, mark a memorable first collection.
Reading Hodson's work feels risky; it's breathtaking, both in its inherent exhilaration and also, often, because it's funny... But it also makes you feel connected to things, as if you are forging new relationships to the things and people in the world around you, uncovering new understandings about permanence, about intuition, about love and sex and lies and secrets and truth, about life.
Despite the nebulous self that emerges, Hodson’s writing style betrays her in a way, offering a clear and strong point of view. Although less successful pieces can lose the narrative thread and read disjointedly, this is overall a unique collection about being an artist and a woman in a world that doesn’t always value either.
