Reading Boyishly - Roland Barthes, J. M. Barrie, Jacques Henri Lartigue, Marcel Proust, and D. W. Winnicott Paperback

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. Barrie, Roland Barthes, Marcel Proust, D. W. In this homage to four boyish men and one boy--J. M.

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. Winnicott, and the young photographer Jacques Henri Lartigue--Carol Mavor embraces what some have anxiously labeled an over-attachment to the mother. Nostalgia (from the Greek nostos = return to native land, and algos =