7 Comments

Yes to all of this! If everyone were to know the possibility of a more expansive version of the term ‘family’ then the world would be a better place. I’ve learned so much more about family and community from being separated than I did when I was in a lonely, isolated marriage unit.

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You're so right to conflate family and community, similar values, rather than family as some kind of isolated judgmental defensive state against the rest of the world

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🫶

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Sep 10Liked by Liadán Hynes

I just finished James Patterson's book about the Kennedys yesterday and this exact thought struck me throughout. Any woman unfortunately enough to come into contact with them - and therevwere many - was either abused, gaslit, forved into submission or humiliated - sometimes all four. How those horrible men, with their intergenerational misogyny and the matriarchs with their internalised misogyny could be held up as a example of anything positive is sickening. Broken is not the word.

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Absolutely mad when you start to think of it. I felt like so much of the stuff I was reading I already knew, and yet the glamour or whatever perseveres in maintaining the idea of the Kennedys as aspirational in some way

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Sep 10Liked by Liadán Hynes

Yes, exactly! They had such an aura about them. Very Hello! magazine- esque. Very gross though when you stop and think!

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Fuck the fucking head-tilters and YES to community and found family!

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