Summary

The author describes her first encounter with Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. In a doctoral class at university, an introductory game led by Sedgwick led the author to a new understanding about herself and her work. The author also refers to how an article by Sedgwick led, before it was even published, to her being viciously vilified and pursued by those who resented, according to the author, both the idea about which she was writing and her happiness and success in writing about it. This leads the author to consideration of a similar circumstance: the unhappy response of a particular reader to her writing about the murder of her mother’s sister Jane. That reader, she writes, became a stalker from whom she had to be protected (this, she adds, was taking place during the period in which she was trying to get pregnant...