I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman is neither a self-defence of heteronormativity nor a salacious lesbian romp. I finished reading this over the weekend – and again and again – but the Substack essay got out of hand.

The essay is a critique of the book, which I liked very much and recommend highly, but it had some authorial challenges I felt were addressable. My essay is very much critical theory rather than a literary critique.

I took notes in ChatGPT as I read it – par for the course – and I engaged in dialogue afterwards. I wrote the preamble, and then engaged Claude as ChatGPT and I traded ideas. I bounced the outline and some ideas off of Claude. It suggested that each section should rather be a chapter released as a series. In the end, it appears to have been right. Nonetheless, I tasked Claude with the final output.

As I was adding nuance and endnotes, Substack began straining under the weight, so I stopped before something got corrupted. My goal was to provide more context to English-only readers. I added more inline – among en dashes – but I decided to publish it as-is, perhaps editing these clarifications after the fact.