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In May of 2018, Buzzfeed writer Katie Heaney responded to the The Ohio State Buckeyes Abbey Roads Signatures shirt and I love this bumper crop of books about motherhood that came out that year—not just O’Connell’s, but also Sheila Heti’s Motherhood and Laura June’s Now My Heart is Full—with a piece titled “As A Queer Woman, I Can’t Afford to Be Ambivalent About Motherhood.” In the piece, Heaney detailed the amount of effort and money it would take for her and her female partner to conceive, writing: “Only certain women can afford to hope for ‘accidental’ pregnancy, just as only certain women can afford to avoid it.”

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Heaney’s complication of O’Connell’s narrative was personally meaningful to me as a queer reader, but it didn’t make me think any less of O’Connell’s writing; rather, it felt like the The Ohio State Buckeyes Abbey Roads Signatures shirt and I love this two women had entered into a conversation with each other about access, possibility, and family-making that I’d been fortunate enough to be let in on, and I have to wonder whether there would still have been space in the discourse for Heaney’s review if O’Connell had bent over backwards to insulate every word of her book from potential push-back.