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Muerde a tus amigos
Una investigación histórica y autobiográfica sobre el poder subversivo del cuerpo, desde la Antigua Roma hasta la Rusia de Putin.
¿Qué lleva a ciertas personas a transformar su cuerpo en un arma de resistencia y emancipación política y espiritual? ¿Y qué podemos aprender de su ejemplo? En Muerde a tus amigos, la novelista y crítica cultural Fernanda Eberstadt investiga las vidas de santos, pensadores y artistas que se valieron de sus cuerpos, a menudo frágiles y estigmatizados, para desafiar al poder establecido por la vía del ascetismo, la sensualidad o la Diógenes el Cínico, que vivió sin ningún pudor en la plaza pública; Perpetua y Felicidad, mártires del cristianismo primitivo; profetas laicos como Pier Paolo Pasolini y Michel Foucault, y activistas como Nadia Tolokónnikova, fundadora de Pussy Riot.
Entrelazando estas historias de disidencia corporal con sus propias vivencias de juventud en el underground neoyorquino de los años setenta, Eberstadt nos invita a repensar las relaciones entre el dolor, el erotismo, la belleza y la libertad. Para ello, propone un fascinante viaje histórico e intelectual con escala en la Rusia de Putin, la contracultura californiana, los combates de gladiadores de la Antigua Roma, o una corrida de toros en el sur de Francia.
Tratado filosófico, confesión íntima y manifiesto político, este libro es una exploración sugestiva y vibrante del poder subversivo del cuerpo.
La crítica ha dicho...
«Una insurrección literaria del tipo de cronista semi-gonzo que solo se encuentra en Estados exuberante, visceral, testaruda y altamente adictiva.» The Independent
«Nadie ha capturado el pasado reciente de Estados Unidos de manera tan vívida, detallada y poderosa.» Bret Easton Ellis
«Eberstadt describe las duras vidas y muertes de activistas, homosexuales, santos, filósofos y otros réprobos que se negaron a postrarse ante lo que sus contemporáneos llamaban normalidad y verdad. Su legado y este libro son una mordedura que sana.» André Aciman
«Deslumbrante y provocadora. Una invitación a reivindicar el poder del cuerpo, así como una historia de resistencia, subversión y disidencia.» Olivia Laing
«En este libro, la relación entre la carne y el espíritu se materializa en cuerpos reales.» Benjamin Moser
¿Qué lleva a ciertas personas a transformar su cuerpo en un arma de resistencia y emancipación política y espiritual? ¿Y qué podemos aprender de su ejemplo? En Muerde a tus amigos, la novelista y crítica cultural Fernanda Eberstadt investiga las vidas de santos, pensadores y artistas que se valieron de sus cuerpos, a menudo frágiles y estigmatizados, para desafiar al poder establecido por la vía del ascetismo, la sensualidad o la Diógenes el Cínico, que vivió sin ningún pudor en la plaza pública; Perpetua y Felicidad, mártires del cristianismo primitivo; profetas laicos como Pier Paolo Pasolini y Michel Foucault, y activistas como Nadia Tolokónnikova, fundadora de Pussy Riot.
Entrelazando estas historias de disidencia corporal con sus propias vivencias de juventud en el underground neoyorquino de los años setenta, Eberstadt nos invita a repensar las relaciones entre el dolor, el erotismo, la belleza y la libertad. Para ello, propone un fascinante viaje histórico e intelectual con escala en la Rusia de Putin, la contracultura californiana, los combates de gladiadores de la Antigua Roma, o una corrida de toros en el sur de Francia.
Tratado filosófico, confesión íntima y manifiesto político, este libro es una exploración sugestiva y vibrante del poder subversivo del cuerpo.
La crítica ha dicho...
«Una insurrección literaria del tipo de cronista semi-gonzo que solo se encuentra en Estados exuberante, visceral, testaruda y altamente adictiva.» The Independent
«Nadie ha capturado el pasado reciente de Estados Unidos de manera tan vívida, detallada y poderosa.» Bret Easton Ellis
«Eberstadt describe las duras vidas y muertes de activistas, homosexuales, santos, filósofos y otros réprobos que se negaron a postrarse ante lo que sus contemporáneos llamaban normalidad y verdad. Su legado y este libro son una mordedura que sana.» André Aciman
«Deslumbrante y provocadora. Una invitación a reivindicar el poder del cuerpo, así como una historia de resistencia, subversión y disidencia.» Olivia Laing
«En este libro, la relación entre la carne y el espíritu se materializa en cuerpos reales.» Benjamin Moser
290 pages, Kindle Edition
Published March 24, 2025
12 people are currently reading
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Displaying 1 - 20 of 20 reviews
June 9, 2025
“Una cicatriz no es una herida. Una cicatriz es el cuerpo sanándose a sí mismo, la carne incorporando el antiguo daño en su nueva piel. Una cicatriz es un arreglo imperfecto que trenza el bocado con un nuevo todo vivo y dice: SIGO AQUÍ.”
February 17, 2024
Thank you @europaeditionsuk for the proof copy for us at @dial_lane_books!
As a fan of social history I couldn’t wait dive into @fernandaeberstadt’s Bite Your Friends! As someone who feels often like my body is failing me, it was inspiring to read about the folks in Fernanda’s book. Some I was familiar with but others were new to me.
The stories of the artists, activists and humans featured weave a tapestry of stories of people finding freedom in themselves, freedom from societal expectations, freedom from authority and freedom from dictatorship of all kinds.
Throughout Fernanda’s work there is a thread of her own autobiography, the inspiration that she has gained from the individuals featured and her own sense of self and bodily autonomy.
There also flows through the work a sense of joy, and an inquisitiveness that will make you ask Fernanda’s questions of yourself.
As a fan of social history I couldn’t wait dive into @fernandaeberstadt’s Bite Your Friends! As someone who feels often like my body is failing me, it was inspiring to read about the folks in Fernanda’s book. Some I was familiar with but others were new to me.
The stories of the artists, activists and humans featured weave a tapestry of stories of people finding freedom in themselves, freedom from societal expectations, freedom from authority and freedom from dictatorship of all kinds.
Throughout Fernanda’s work there is a thread of her own autobiography, the inspiration that she has gained from the individuals featured and her own sense of self and bodily autonomy.
There also flows through the work a sense of joy, and an inquisitiveness that will make you ask Fernanda’s questions of yourself.
August 24, 2025
okay so full disclosure: i bought this book for a bit. it was like 10 euros in american book centre, i had money to spare post payday, and the title (combined with the name of the author) was silly enough to surely make my friends laugh. first i took a picture of it, but then the blurb lowkey sounded really good, henceforth it was purchased. now i finally read it and, hmm. mixed feelings.
there is a section in the middle that is extremely interesting and good - the one about martyr saints and the one about pussy riot (though as a pole with lviv roots i feel obliged to say that the author doesn't say shit about the fact that pussy riot doesnt say shit about the invasion of ukraine........ so perchance this is another case of imperfect activist, a comparison to pavlensky could be made, but um whatever i guess). i was annotating, i was underlining, i was planning to pitch it to friends as like skip the first few chapters and get into this. unfortunately the third part was also very mid and left me somewhat doubtful.
the thing is, there is an apocalypse of authors wildly overestimating how much i want to know about them and their lives. i was under the impression that this will be a book about people who used their bodies to disrupt systems - sounds great! however the first section is only about how fernanda eberstadt grew so terribly rich, and had the misfortune of being a nepo baby, and it was so difficult to have so much money and splendour, and btw she knew all the important people of the time, this is crucial for you, the reader, to know. like, i don't know, girl. i get that the story of your mom is semi-relevant, but the amount of flexing is irritating. the few nonchalant mentions of her far-right dip also left me with uhm interesting thoughts. perchance this could be utilized better in the book, as in all her biographical details, but it felt more self-indulgent than relevant.
then comes the really good part, blending research with lyrical writing, and this is basically what i wanted the whole book to be. a chapter dedicated to each specific historical figure, and fine, fernanda eberstadt, if you must, you can incorporate little glimpses of yourself, but diva, this is a memoir with diogenes slapped on it in postproduction.
the last part was also a lot to consider, as it is about pasolini and covid, inexplicably. spinning a wheel and throwing a dart to pick a topic situation. like gun to my head i cannot tell you what pasolini has to do with covid. he ummm was trapped in a homophobic society and fernanda eberstadt in 2020 was ummm trapped in her luxurious home. this is actually the same situation. when it comes to acknowledge her privilege and very different reality from her subject, in general the author either doesnt do it or doesnt do it enough for me register. she compares herself to pasolini or early christian martyrs a little bit too easily for my taste.
in the end, she also doesnt say it outright, but she somewhat implies that lowkey the fact that pasolini clearly had a thing for 15/16 year old boys is lowkey okay! because eberstadt also had infatuations with older man when she was a teenager and it was fine! girl. as a person of being groomed experience i say stop now. like perhaps it is not your task to either condemn or absolve pasolini. like lowkey maybe this is not what the book is about????
mixed feelings. silly book to be having though. at least erika and elton laughed about it at a picnic once and isnt that what life is all about
there is a section in the middle that is extremely interesting and good - the one about martyr saints and the one about pussy riot (though as a pole with lviv roots i feel obliged to say that the author doesn't say shit about the fact that pussy riot doesnt say shit about the invasion of ukraine........ so perchance this is another case of imperfect activist, a comparison to pavlensky could be made, but um whatever i guess). i was annotating, i was underlining, i was planning to pitch it to friends as like skip the first few chapters and get into this. unfortunately the third part was also very mid and left me somewhat doubtful.
the thing is, there is an apocalypse of authors wildly overestimating how much i want to know about them and their lives. i was under the impression that this will be a book about people who used their bodies to disrupt systems - sounds great! however the first section is only about how fernanda eberstadt grew so terribly rich, and had the misfortune of being a nepo baby, and it was so difficult to have so much money and splendour, and btw she knew all the important people of the time, this is crucial for you, the reader, to know. like, i don't know, girl. i get that the story of your mom is semi-relevant, but the amount of flexing is irritating. the few nonchalant mentions of her far-right dip also left me with uhm interesting thoughts. perchance this could be utilized better in the book, as in all her biographical details, but it felt more self-indulgent than relevant.
then comes the really good part, blending research with lyrical writing, and this is basically what i wanted the whole book to be. a chapter dedicated to each specific historical figure, and fine, fernanda eberstadt, if you must, you can incorporate little glimpses of yourself, but diva, this is a memoir with diogenes slapped on it in postproduction.
the last part was also a lot to consider, as it is about pasolini and covid, inexplicably. spinning a wheel and throwing a dart to pick a topic situation. like gun to my head i cannot tell you what pasolini has to do with covid. he ummm was trapped in a homophobic society and fernanda eberstadt in 2020 was ummm trapped in her luxurious home. this is actually the same situation. when it comes to acknowledge her privilege and very different reality from her subject, in general the author either doesnt do it or doesnt do it enough for me register. she compares herself to pasolini or early christian martyrs a little bit too easily for my taste.
in the end, she also doesnt say it outright, but she somewhat implies that lowkey the fact that pasolini clearly had a thing for 15/16 year old boys is lowkey okay! because eberstadt also had infatuations with older man when she was a teenager and it was fine! girl. as a person of being groomed experience i say stop now. like perhaps it is not your task to either condemn or absolve pasolini. like lowkey maybe this is not what the book is about????
mixed feelings. silly book to be having though. at least erika and elton laughed about it at a picnic once and isnt that what life is all about
October 18, 2025
Sí, pero no. Te hace pensar y reflexionar y te deja un poso de ideas interesantes, pero hay fragmentos que se me hacen eternos. A lo mejor es mi falta de referencia cultural pero se me hacía difícil de seguir a veces. He disfrutado más la lectura cuando era más directa y menos poética.
December 30, 2025
este libro es todo lo que me interesa: cuerpo, sufrimiento, acción política, arte y místicas
March 16, 2024
Oh my god. I can’t even wait to finish this before I give it 5 stars. What an ecstatic read.
April 10, 2024
'I bite my friends to heal them' Diogenes the Cynic 350BC
'You're not so big on following orders, Diogenes the Cynic, and your singing is more of a howl, but still I'm asking you to be my muse. You, the mad dog of ancient Greek philosophy, prophet of shamelessness and anti-power, who slept in a barrel, ate, shat, preached, had sex in the public square, and sold yourself into slavery to prove that it's the people who need to enslave others who are the unfree ones. There are so many ways this story can be told. I'm asking you, Diogenes, enemy of cant, to help me find my way boldly, back to where it all began."
I definitely enjoyed this and got a lot out of it - particularly Eberstadt's's personal story actually, which isn't always the case with these 'hybrid' theory/social analysis/art history/memoir books. I really loved hearing about her mother, the glamorous Andy Warhol muse whose body was subject to various tyrannies throughout her life. The opening section of the book was very strong indeed:
"'Those scars would fetch you top dollar in a bordello'" The man had seized hold of my mothers inner wrist, and was reading its fierce embroidery like a fortune. My mother's body was a house of pain, of wounds left by medical technology: the wrist-sized railroad tracks were in fact scars from the tubes that had hooked her up to a dialysis machine when she had kidney failure, the leg that had been scooped out like an abandoned strip mine was where a melanoma had been removed."
I really, really loved hearing about her performance artist friend Stephen Varble:
"Peter Hujar and Stephen Varble had been friends and lovers. it was Stephen who'd first introduced me to Peter Hujar in the mid seventies, though we'd both been too awkward at the time to do much besides look at our feet and afterwards say things to Stepehen abut the other we hoped Stephen would pass along. Later I'd occasionally bump into Peter Hujar at parties and I still had a kind of crush on him, this feeling of unspoken affinity, as if we were destined to be friends and could afford to take out time about it. It was only after his death from AIDS that I'd gotten to know Peter Hujar's work. certain of his portraits - of the transgender star Candy Darling in her hospital bed, of himself leaping in the air - had become part of my mental arsenal of sacred images, along with photographs by David Wojnarowicz of Peter dying...It had been decades since I'd let myself think abut Stephen Varble. The very last time we met, after a few years of his sending me increasingly frantic change-of-address cards begging me to get in touch was when I'd moved back to New York after college. That was in 1982, the year the New York Times first reported on what was then being called 'gay cancer'. Throughout he plague years...I somehow managed to block out Stephen Varble in a kind of guilty fucked-up forgetting.....I googled Stephen Varble and waited....I tried again and this time found a reference to the 'now forgotten performance artist Stephen Varble, an early AIDS victim. His dates: 1946-1984. The sense of desolation was pretty terrible. But Stephen Varble isn't forgotten. ..There are museum retrospectives devoted to the art of David Wojnarowicz, Peter Hujar, Martin Wong, Alvin Baltrop; a new generation is discovering the music of Arthur Russell and Julius Eastman and Klaus Nomi, seeking out those crazily gifted guerrilla performers who seemed to be telling us something we had forgotten and needed to know. Stephen Varble has finally come into his own. His playful intrusions of museums, banks and luxury goods stores, half naked, wearing ballgowns made of garbage, satirize a way of life that's killing the planet.
In April 1975, three weeks after our first encounter, I invited Stephen home to meet my parents. My parents liked to hang out with experimental artists, but always in the position of society people, patrons, which meant that certain class boundaries had to be reinforced, terms negotiated before their fourteen year old daughter could bring home the drag queen she's met at Easter Parade. No, Stephen was not allowed to come to dinner but he could come for an after dinner drink. No, Stephen was not allowed to come as his alter ego Marie Debris; he could only come in his civvies....'We had all been very tense, but it was alright actually' I noted in my diary. Stephen drank 'lots and lots of sherry' and he and my parents talking about Warhol stars they all knew'. At midnight my parents went to bed, and I fed Stephen the remains of the sad-roe diner...We then dressed up in my mother's clothes - Stephen in an emerald green ostrich-feather jacket; me in an ankle length Yves Saint Laurent cavalry coat - and we headed down to a nightspot called Lady Astor's, in the basement of a colonnade of Greek revival rowhouses on Lafayette Street:
'I had some allowance to I paid for everything. It was quite weird, faintly congenial scene there - men in pink satin boots up to their thighs. We sat on a crowded little sofa, talking about killing ourselves and Dostoevsky and Stephen's money problem. He is very desperate and unhappy. He feels that I don't like Marie Debris and said 'I'm sorry but I just can't give her up'. "
...And her personal recollections of other extreme figures such as Piotr Pavlensky (who turns out to be so much more of a horror show than you could imagine) and her fascinating section on Adrian Piper ('the power of Piper's seventies street art is that t taps into a universal unease about the rage, or bestiality, or deviance that's bottled up inside us; the fear that beneath our civilised veneer is a street person muttering angry monologues...as females we're raised to he courteous, unassuming, conciliatory , but Mythic Being, cigarette in mouth snarls 'Get Out of my Way Asshole'...Piper's Mythic Being is a way of outfacing a cynical society in which it's hard to know what's appearance and what's real....Art lies in the cracks, the deep tremors, the dysfunction, in the gap between our own broken capabilities and the unpoliced world we're hoping to create. Art lies in the space between the bite and the person bitten.'). Her experimentations with drugs, sex, right wing politics, country life, motherhood, feminism, finding a way back to engagement with activism and writing were all very intriguing to me.
I loved all of the musings on 70s performance art, resistance to power, the section on Pussy Riot was fairly interesting, but I didn't particularly enjoy the section on Pier Paolo Pasolini (perhaps because I haven't encountered any of his films, and I found his predilections too abhorrent ) and whilst the Foucault stuff was moderately interesting, it also didn't quite do it for me:
"Foucault longs to be freed from gender into the 'happy limbo of non-identity'..there's a revealing interview he gives in 1982....Are you susceptible to aesthetic pleasure, Riggins asks? I mean, I think of French people as having this savoir vivre, but you seem to me pretty ascetic. Foucault is startled. He starts to stammer. Of course I love beautiful things, I'm not a total savage but then he makes a strange admission. The truth is, he confesses, he is so locked up in his own head that he finds it almost impossible to experience what he images other people mean by pleasure - that's why drugs are so important to him. He doesn't really enjoy music or art, or even a good dinner with friends, in fact, his idea of heaven is grabbing a club sandwich and a Coke...Real pleasure Foucault suspects would be so extreme it would destroy him. Real pleasure is a Nietzchean limit-experience from which you wake up dead."
Overall, there were too many bits that couldn't hold my interest. Somehow people like Olivia Laing, Chris Kraus and Anne Boyer worm their way into my heart and brain and soul in a way that this one just did not, but that is to do with my own personal fascinations not quite aligning with Eberstadt's.
I went to hear Fernanda talk about this book to, which enriched my experience of it even more - reminding me of why I love book events so much.
'You're not so big on following orders, Diogenes the Cynic, and your singing is more of a howl, but still I'm asking you to be my muse. You, the mad dog of ancient Greek philosophy, prophet of shamelessness and anti-power, who slept in a barrel, ate, shat, preached, had sex in the public square, and sold yourself into slavery to prove that it's the people who need to enslave others who are the unfree ones. There are so many ways this story can be told. I'm asking you, Diogenes, enemy of cant, to help me find my way boldly, back to where it all began."
I definitely enjoyed this and got a lot out of it - particularly Eberstadt's's personal story actually, which isn't always the case with these 'hybrid' theory/social analysis/art history/memoir books. I really loved hearing about her mother, the glamorous Andy Warhol muse whose body was subject to various tyrannies throughout her life. The opening section of the book was very strong indeed:
"'Those scars would fetch you top dollar in a bordello'" The man had seized hold of my mothers inner wrist, and was reading its fierce embroidery like a fortune. My mother's body was a house of pain, of wounds left by medical technology: the wrist-sized railroad tracks were in fact scars from the tubes that had hooked her up to a dialysis machine when she had kidney failure, the leg that had been scooped out like an abandoned strip mine was where a melanoma had been removed."
I really, really loved hearing about her performance artist friend Stephen Varble:
"Peter Hujar and Stephen Varble had been friends and lovers. it was Stephen who'd first introduced me to Peter Hujar in the mid seventies, though we'd both been too awkward at the time to do much besides look at our feet and afterwards say things to Stepehen abut the other we hoped Stephen would pass along. Later I'd occasionally bump into Peter Hujar at parties and I still had a kind of crush on him, this feeling of unspoken affinity, as if we were destined to be friends and could afford to take out time about it. It was only after his death from AIDS that I'd gotten to know Peter Hujar's work. certain of his portraits - of the transgender star Candy Darling in her hospital bed, of himself leaping in the air - had become part of my mental arsenal of sacred images, along with photographs by David Wojnarowicz of Peter dying...It had been decades since I'd let myself think abut Stephen Varble. The very last time we met, after a few years of his sending me increasingly frantic change-of-address cards begging me to get in touch was when I'd moved back to New York after college. That was in 1982, the year the New York Times first reported on what was then being called 'gay cancer'. Throughout he plague years...I somehow managed to block out Stephen Varble in a kind of guilty fucked-up forgetting.....I googled Stephen Varble and waited....I tried again and this time found a reference to the 'now forgotten performance artist Stephen Varble, an early AIDS victim. His dates: 1946-1984. The sense of desolation was pretty terrible. But Stephen Varble isn't forgotten. ..There are museum retrospectives devoted to the art of David Wojnarowicz, Peter Hujar, Martin Wong, Alvin Baltrop; a new generation is discovering the music of Arthur Russell and Julius Eastman and Klaus Nomi, seeking out those crazily gifted guerrilla performers who seemed to be telling us something we had forgotten and needed to know. Stephen Varble has finally come into his own. His playful intrusions of museums, banks and luxury goods stores, half naked, wearing ballgowns made of garbage, satirize a way of life that's killing the planet.
In April 1975, three weeks after our first encounter, I invited Stephen home to meet my parents. My parents liked to hang out with experimental artists, but always in the position of society people, patrons, which meant that certain class boundaries had to be reinforced, terms negotiated before their fourteen year old daughter could bring home the drag queen she's met at Easter Parade. No, Stephen was not allowed to come to dinner but he could come for an after dinner drink. No, Stephen was not allowed to come as his alter ego Marie Debris; he could only come in his civvies....'We had all been very tense, but it was alright actually' I noted in my diary. Stephen drank 'lots and lots of sherry' and he and my parents talking about Warhol stars they all knew'. At midnight my parents went to bed, and I fed Stephen the remains of the sad-roe diner...We then dressed up in my mother's clothes - Stephen in an emerald green ostrich-feather jacket; me in an ankle length Yves Saint Laurent cavalry coat - and we headed down to a nightspot called Lady Astor's, in the basement of a colonnade of Greek revival rowhouses on Lafayette Street:
'I had some allowance to I paid for everything. It was quite weird, faintly congenial scene there - men in pink satin boots up to their thighs. We sat on a crowded little sofa, talking about killing ourselves and Dostoevsky and Stephen's money problem. He is very desperate and unhappy. He feels that I don't like Marie Debris and said 'I'm sorry but I just can't give her up'. "
...And her personal recollections of other extreme figures such as Piotr Pavlensky (who turns out to be so much more of a horror show than you could imagine) and her fascinating section on Adrian Piper ('the power of Piper's seventies street art is that t taps into a universal unease about the rage, or bestiality, or deviance that's bottled up inside us; the fear that beneath our civilised veneer is a street person muttering angry monologues...as females we're raised to he courteous, unassuming, conciliatory , but Mythic Being, cigarette in mouth snarls 'Get Out of my Way Asshole'...Piper's Mythic Being is a way of outfacing a cynical society in which it's hard to know what's appearance and what's real....Art lies in the cracks, the deep tremors, the dysfunction, in the gap between our own broken capabilities and the unpoliced world we're hoping to create. Art lies in the space between the bite and the person bitten.'). Her experimentations with drugs, sex, right wing politics, country life, motherhood, feminism, finding a way back to engagement with activism and writing were all very intriguing to me.
I loved all of the musings on 70s performance art, resistance to power, the section on Pussy Riot was fairly interesting, but I didn't particularly enjoy the section on Pier Paolo Pasolini (perhaps because I haven't encountered any of his films, and I found his predilections too abhorrent ) and whilst the Foucault stuff was moderately interesting, it also didn't quite do it for me:
"Foucault longs to be freed from gender into the 'happy limbo of non-identity'..there's a revealing interview he gives in 1982....Are you susceptible to aesthetic pleasure, Riggins asks? I mean, I think of French people as having this savoir vivre, but you seem to me pretty ascetic. Foucault is startled. He starts to stammer. Of course I love beautiful things, I'm not a total savage but then he makes a strange admission. The truth is, he confesses, he is so locked up in his own head that he finds it almost impossible to experience what he images other people mean by pleasure - that's why drugs are so important to him. He doesn't really enjoy music or art, or even a good dinner with friends, in fact, his idea of heaven is grabbing a club sandwich and a Coke...Real pleasure Foucault suspects would be so extreme it would destroy him. Real pleasure is a Nietzchean limit-experience from which you wake up dead."
Overall, there were too many bits that couldn't hold my interest. Somehow people like Olivia Laing, Chris Kraus and Anne Boyer worm their way into my heart and brain and soul in a way that this one just did not, but that is to do with my own personal fascinations not quite aligning with Eberstadt's.
I went to hear Fernanda talk about this book to, which enriched my experience of it even more - reminding me of why I love book events so much.
July 17, 2025
No se como definir a este estudio por la vida de diferentes profesoras filósofos artistas y personajes que hacen lo que quieren y cuando quieren con su cuerpo y que eso sirve de resistencia y mensaje para el futuro. Si quieres hacer algo hazlo. Y punto. Muy recomendable
April 28, 2025
Perfecto
April 29, 2025
Memoir no del todo bien conseguido en el que acaban teniendo más interés las vidas ajenas a las que hace referencia tangencial que la vida de la propia autora.
May 29, 2025
Bought this on a whim from a local bookstore when I was drawn in by the title and the first few pages of prose. This is a memoir, but also a bunch of stories strung together about historical figures, the author's family, and people the author has known in her life, both as friends and celebrities she's interviewed, all tied together with the theme of bodies, things that happen to bodies, and what that says about society. The title comes from a Diogenes quote, and that sets the vibe throughout.
It's a compelling theme and premise, but the prose jumps around a lot from story to story which was hard to get used to at first. Unfortunately, the author lost me at the end. The section about Petr Pavlensky was particularly disturbing and contained some pretty graphic descriptions of horrific abuse, and then immediately after was a long rambly section about an Italian director that I was unfamiliar with, so I DNFed with like 20 pages left.
I still enjoyed most of what I read and it was an interesting concept. So, 3 stars.
It's a compelling theme and premise, but the prose jumps around a lot from story to story which was hard to get used to at first. Unfortunately, the author lost me at the end. The section about Petr Pavlensky was particularly disturbing and contained some pretty graphic descriptions of horrific abuse, and then immediately after was a long rambly section about an Italian director that I was unfamiliar with, so I DNFed with like 20 pages left.
I still enjoyed most of what I read and it was an interesting concept. So, 3 stars.
December 31, 2024
Brilliant and obtuse
Brilliant prose, especially good describing NYC in the late 70's, 80's. The bad part is her judgement. Hagiographying e.g. pussy riot as.exemplars of artistic and moral excellence is downright weird in a time of genoc
Brilliant prose, especially good describing NYC in the late 70's, 80's. The bad part is her judgement. Hagiographying e.g. pussy riot as.exemplars of artistic and moral excellence is downright weird in a time of genoc
October 28, 2025
"A mí todavía me conmueve el glamour del torero, todavía siento una atracción irrefrenable por las personas que ponen en peligro su cuerpo y de ese modo se vuelven intocables [...].
Hay muchísimas cosas que me conmueven y que no puedo justificar"
Hay muchísimas cosas que me conmueven y que no puedo justificar"
July 21, 2024
naked ladies and gay people what more can a guy ask for honestly
September 30, 2024
i loved loved loved loved loved
January 9, 2025
Fantastic way to start the new year
September 17, 2025
Leer este libro ha sido como sentarse a escuchar a esa prima pija que ha vuelto de un viaje a la que tienes un poco de tirria pero aún así ha habido partes que he disfrutado
September 11, 2025
lo tiene todo
November 20, 2025
Me ha encantado. Recomiendo muchísimo.
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