Griffith Review 84: Attachment Styles
The attachments we form shape our experience of the world and our understanding of who we are. ‘Hell is other people', wrote Jean-Paul Sartre, his point being less about misanthropy and more about how entwined our self-perception is with the ways in which others perceive us. And alongside our personal relationships — from filial to friendship, from collegiate to romantic — sit the complex emotional connections we form with places, ideas and objects.
How do we navigate these varying attachments, and what can they offer us when our lives are so mediated by technology? Can we break free of the tropes and traps associated with our most primal relationships: the social expectations of motherhood, the burdens of filial duty, the complexities of infidelity?
Carody Culver is a writer and editor. Her chapbook, The Morgue I Think the Deader It Gets, was published by Cordite in 2022, and she's been a featured Australian poet on the Best American Poetry blog. A former contributing editor for Peppermint magazine, she is currently the editor of Griffith Review.