Notting Hill Editions

big idea was that ‘architecture’, although all too often conceived by theorists, is actually about daily life, where people really live and how they live. Nairn himself kept his distance from architects, although his work was increasingly influential on them. Instead he travelled, drank and wrote books like this, which were meant to be ‘not an invitation to argument but to discovery’.

I knew that pain was not a muse,

ve, which I was supposed to be practicing and was not. I had no model; I knew no female bodies like my own.

wanted that girl to be me, and for that magical friendship to be mine and Frida’s, one in which I could share all the secrets of my body that I believed nobody else would understand or want to know. Someone I could talk to without shame or embarrassment.

The more believable myth, and the one more challenging to embody, is to live on in the body you have been given.

Deformity framed as disaster.

My created body has been shaped, in part, by a team of men over four decades

Doctors, even now, are disinclined to treat the non-normative body with a modicum of respect (forget reverence). They stare

. Is it ‘crippling’ pain? I am not sure. Can one be already crippled and then be somehow crippled again by a new pain, however localized and temporary?

do not want to complain, because I’m embarrassed that something so small could cause