Bookshelf diaries #1: abby

Used bookstores, author cover photos, and the literature of reproductive justice.

Foreword

I met Abby Lacelle during my second MA at the University of Toronto. School was still on Zoom, and she took it upon herself to reach out and ask for my number in the chat. We started texting during class (whoops) and when units came up for rent in her building complex, we became neighbours and soon thereafter, inseparable friends. If I don’t see Abby everyday, we at least talk, and she has been a huge support to me during the difficult early months of 2025.

In addition to being a dedicated friend, a talented baker, and a loving godmother to my dog, Abby is also working on her PhD in English. Her project investigates reproductive justice and loss in 20th and 21st-century American literature, spanning William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying to Torrey Peters’ Detransition, Baby. Abby is thinking about loss capaciously—both literal forms of pregnancy loss like miscarriage and abortion, but also other kinds of loss that accompany pregnancy as a bodily and social transition, as well as post-partum distinctions between parent/child, enforced kinlessness, and maternal subject formation. I feel profound admiration for Abby as a reader and thinker: to discuss books with her is to watch someone full to the brim with excitement as they put together a wholly original, persuasive interpretation of a text right before your eyes. Her mind is so lively and attentive to detail—she is energized by texts, but in turn gives them a kind of luminosity through her enthusiasm and brilliance as well.

I’m honoured to feature Abby in No Outlet’s first “bookshelf diary” entry. You can check out more of Abby’s work over at

paloma magazine

, where she is an editor, and also look forward to our collaborative reading group, Feminist Orientations, which happens virtually most summers.

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On recent book purchases:

“I think I do all of my shopping at Type Books. The Last Safe Abortion picture book is one that I had been holding out for and got on a sunny day a little while ago that I was very excited about, and I thought it was fantastic. It's basically just illustrations, and then the back is kind of the author describing why the text is important.”

“This Kathy Acker book, I'm very into you, is a sequence of emails between Kathy Acker and Mackenzie Wark when they had this seemingly pretend erotic encounter. And what's erotic about it is that they were both putting it on for the sake of creating a text together, which is like their consummation of desire. So I'm excited to read that, as well as Mary and the Dream Rabbit—she’s this true historical figure that I was captivated by maybe a year or two ago, and then someone has novelized her story. I think her name's Mary Toth. She supposedly gave birth to a litter of rabbits. And it was a big kerfuffle where people were trying to decide whether actually, she had given birth to rabbits or whether she hadn't.”

On a book that found you at the right time:

“My instinct is to say All Fours, because I recall you had recommended it to me pretty immediately after it came out. I was going through a breakup, and you said, ‘this might be a text of value to you, but like, maybe give yourself space first.’ And then I got to it several months after the breakup, after grieving another loss, and I was at a cottage with friends on a deck with my top off, and the sun was super bright, and I was reading it, and everything about the narrator's experience of coming back to her life and meeting people was so moving to me that I actually could feel my life like rotating on its axis. In the back of my copy, I have a diary entry from that day, because I felt so full of life again. I remember there was a hornet that was fluttering around me, and I was saying, ‘I don't even care if I get bit right now.’ And now I've been able to loan the copy to my mom, who is post-menopausal and is also coming into herself as a person in new ways. She asked to borrow my copy of the book and it’s like I needed to be ready to receive it, not just in grief,but in love, and then was able to circulate it because of that.”

On a special edition of a book:

“I've always really liked the Antoine de St. Exuperie book Le Petit Prince, which is a French children's book that I actually did not grow up on. I read it as a teenager or something and I was very moved by it. And when I used to work at Bay Used Books, which was a used bookstore where I grew up, this pop-up edition came in. And we always appraise valuable books at the store and sell them online, and this one appraised at like, $150 or something. Then when I stopped working there and moved to go to my undergrad, my bosses gifted it to me.”

“It had some little flaws in it, and I really lovingly repaired them before we could put it online to be purchased. So then it's also a book that I repaired for myself, basically. I think it's a beautiful edition of a book that I really like, but I'm strangely shy about it, because it’s like, sentimental value, even if The Little Prince hasn't kind of remained as prevalent in my life as it used to be.”

“I think when you go into a new bookstore and everything is shiny and appealing, you kind of want to buy everything, whereas I think if you go to a used bookstore and you see, like, a crummy, rundown copy of a book, and you still buy it and you still like it, that's a totally different experience. I have a lot of respect for people who work in publishing, who are making things beautiful so that they're desirable to be purchased, but then I think I am much more attracted to kind of uglier, off-putting books that have a really beautiful effect. And I think I learned that from working at the used bookstore.”

On favourite covers:

“I want to say something so goofy, which is that I am going to plug Kristeva’s The Powers of Horror, particularly my copy. It's just Kristeva’s face on a beige book. I actually do think that people should start putting images of themselves on books—theory, fiction and non-fiction again. Kathy Acker did it all the time. I think…what a fucking legend! Her covers were super cool. I like it when the author's like, ‘what about me?’”

On your favourite books of all time:

The Queen of America Goes to Washington City, Lauren Berlant

“I love The Queen of America goes to Washington City for the way that it thinks through this concept of infantile citizenship and also the perfect citizen, which is the fetus. Infantile citizenship is basically what the perfect citizen is, which is someone who's acquiescent and complacent and follows along with the cruel optimism of patriotism, whereas the fetus as almost a projection onto which the state can put its future and becomes that which constantly needs saving from the violent maternal citizen who is just there to usher in the fetus. And then Lauren Berlant does these fantastic readings of how Lennart Nilsson—the first person to take a fetal image inside a womb and then, like, blow up the image of the fetus—literally was able to remove any kind of person gestating from the picture, which allowed for the fetus to become imaged as something entirely apart. So Berlant has a million really fantastic close readings that support their argument in this text, in a way that I'm like, ‘oh, yeah, that's how you do criticism, that's how you do theory.’”

The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath

“Relatable! That’s it!” [Giggling.]

As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner

“I think it’s formally experimental and wonderful. I feel very attached to several of the characters in it, and it's like a dark comedy at times, in a way that I think is compelling.”

The Member of the Wedding, Carson McCullers

“As I understand it—because this is the only one I've read of hers so far, but The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter is high up on my TBR—McCullers is really attracted to writing young outcast girls, and I think probably with good reason. She does it very well. Frankie, at the center of this, I think, is constantly at tension between being an individual and being a part of something and trying to figure out how to do that.”