I bought this for my friend who takes photos but couldn’t resist looking through it first. I love Nan Goldin’s photography. There’s not anything I can say about it that hasn’t been said before, but I think the best thing art can do (whether novels, paintings, films, whatever) is to give you a sense of hope and show you a new way it’s possible to be in the world. That’s what imagination is I suppose, and the best artists are able to inspire others to imagine. The Ballad of Sexual Dependency lets you imagine a life that isn’t built on the heterosexual middle class American dream but on a queer community of found family. After reading her foreword and afterward I would really like to read more of her writing but looking online it doesn’t seem like she’s written a lot.