Heroines is passionate and sprawling and unapologetic it infuriated and obsessed me. I tell myself that I need to learn to Take Up Space, and Taking Up Space seems like it should look like something more solid, something that knows how to express its well-formed opinions calmly and yet with force. I think that I am Too Much, and it feels like I am oozing all over the floor. Why don't the women in the audience at the event ask any questions? Why do I introduce myself as a waitress instead of saying I'm a writer? But there's a strange disconnect somewhere between Being Too Much and yet not Taking Up Enough Space, which sound like they should at least resemble each other, or that one should be en route to the other. Reading Zambreno's meditations on this kind of pathologizing, I thought a lot about the state of Being Too Much versus the desire-and what also, often, feels like the feminist responsibility-to Take Up Space. She reclaims and reinterprets the biographies of people like Jane Bowles and Zelda Fitzgerald and Vivien(ne) Eliot, who were pathologized, diagnosed as hysterics for their excesses of emotion, even as all that Being Too Much was appropriated by their husbands as material, for use in their works-books that would later be canonized as Great American Literature. In Heroines, Zambreno writes about the women of modernism. One of the dropper bottles had been marked by my practitioner: '1 drop every night, or as needed for fear of being too much.' The timing was almost too good. A few months ago, as I was furiously reading and re-reading Kate Zambreno's Heroines (Semiotext(e)), my new homeopathic remedies arrived in the mail.

Heroines zambreno