An intricate text filled to the brim with connotations of desire, home, and childhood--nests, food, beds, birds, fairies, bits of string, ribbon, goodnight kisses, appetites sated and denied--Reading Boyishly is a story of mothers and sons, loss and longing, writing and photography. In this homage to four boyish men and one boy--J. M. Barrie, Roland Barthes, Marcel Proust, D. W. Winnicott, and the young photographer Jacques Henri Lartigue--Carol Mavor embraces what some have anxiously labeled an over-attachment to the mother. Here, the maternal is a cord (unsevered) to the night-light...