Margeaux Feldman presents 'Touch Me, I'm Sick'

Third Place Books welcomes author, artist, and public educator Margeaux Feldman to our Seward Park store for a conversation about their new book, — a memoir in essays focused on trauma, care, and intimacy that calls readers to rethink the ways we seek healing.

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Reject the stigmas of trauma and chronic illness by fostering queer forms of intimacy—and embracing the many ways humans can care for one another.

The writer behind the popular @softcore_trauma Instagram offers a deeply personal memoir for folks seeking healing and better care.

The forms of intimacy and care that we’ve been sold are woefully inadequate and problematic. In a world that treats those who are sick and traumatized as problems in need of a cure, nonbinary writer, artist, educator, and Instagram creator Margeaux Feldman offers a different story.

Trauma, which all too often manifests as chronic illness, tells us that there is something deeply wrong with the world we live in. A world that promotes individualism, fractures us from community through violence and systemic oppression, and leaves us traumatized. That is what we need to cure.

While unveiling their own lived experiences caregiving for their sick father, losing their mother, surviving sexual abuse, and grappling with their own chronic illness, Feldman provides roadmaps for embracing queer modes of care, or “hysterical intimacies,” that reject the notion that those who have been labeled sick are broken. Feldman looks at the lengthy history of branding girls, women, and femmes–and their desires–as sick, from the treatment of hysterics by Jean-Martin Charcot and Sigmund Freud in the 19th and 20th centuries. What emerges is a valiant call for rethinking the ways we seek healing.

This compelling blend of theory, personal narrative, and cultural criticism offers a path forward for reimagining the shapes and forms that intimacy, care, and interdependence can take.

Margeaux Feldman (they/them) is a writer, a public educator, and an artist. They hold an MFA in Creative Writing from CalArts and a PhD in English Literature and Sexual Diversity Studies from the University of Toronto. Their essays have been published in The Sonora Review, GUTS: A Canadian Feminist Magazine, PRISM, Rabble, and The Ex-Puritan, amongst others. They also run the popular Instagram meme account @softcore_trauma where they write about their experiences living with trauma and chronic illness. They currently live in Los Angeles with their 2 elderly cats. You can learn more about them on their website www.margeauxfeldman.com.

Founded in 1998 in Lake Forest Park, Washington, Third Place Books is dedicated to the creation of a community around books and the ideas inside them. With locations in Lake Forest Park and Seattle's Ravenna and Seward Park neighborhoods, Third Place Books is proud to serve the entire Seattle metro area. Learn more about their event series at thirdplacebooks.com/events

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