A Mother Is an Intellectual Thing: Essays

"Ingenious out of necessity, A Mother Is an Intellectual Thing centers around the scapegoating and exile of the author by her mother. In these essays, Kimberly Grey harnesses her formidable intellectual and creative resources to create coherence for an unstable, traumatized self. To do so, she calls on-beseeches-dozens of brilliant thinkers and artists for help, among them Etel Adnan, Roland Barthes, John Cage, Anna Freud, Mina Loy, Elaine Scarry, Gertrude Stein, and Simone Weil. Grey's engagement with these figures (and many others) is part of her effort to stabilize, if not fully comprehend, the inconceivability of her maternal banishment. By thinking her pain rather than feeling it, Grey becomes an expert witness to her own trauma, a ponderer of motherhood even as her identity as daughter has been rescinded"--