Amanda Montei: The Impossible Desire

Amanda Montei’s Touched Out is a new kind of expedition across and within a mother’s body. In some ways, the memoir slots easily within a motherhood canon that has developed over the last decade, one that moves away from dispensing advice to reckon instead with art and sexual politics. These books are often characterized by an ambivalence between the conventional desire for family and the cost of that desire.

What sets Montei’s narrative apart is its inversion of physical desire. Her focus is the longing not to be touched, a theme less often explored. She searches for more precise language around moments of daily life in which a mother wants to lock herself in a bathroom and run a hot shower to scrub off handprints perceptible to her alone. When a body feels an aversion to the hands of loved ones — of children, of partners, of men — what is it attempting to withdraw from, exactly? What words capture a disempowerment that is constructed, both subtly and explicitly, years before a woman becomes a mother, or a wife? The term touched out started surfacing in motherhood forums in the mid-2010s, right before #MeToo, and Montei investigates a connection between the two.

This investigation includes a cold, hard look at the history