But in 1974, I became a mother and about the same time fell in love with another woman. Suddenly I was living the most common experience in a woman’s life which is motherhood and at the same time I was living the most marginal experience in a woman’s life which is lesbianism.
Motherhood made life absolutely concrete (two bodies to wash, to clean, to move, to think of) and lesbianism made my life absolute fiction in a patriarchal heterosexual world. Motherhood shaped my solidarity with women and gave me a feminist consciousness as lesbianism opened new mental space to explore.
All this to say that my body was getting new ideas, new feelings, new emotions. From then on my writing started to change. It became more fluid, though still abstract and still obsessed with language, transgression, subversion; but this time I had “carnal knowledge” of what I was investing in words.
Poetic Politics, Nicole Brossard