Swell
Sex, Power, Pain, Freedom, and Considering Motherhood
American writer and producer Katie Kheriji-Watts has been in Paris since her early twenties—working in the arts, travelling internationally for her job, and enjoying the city with her French-Tunisian husband. After a lifetime of certainty that motherhood wasn’t for her, she begins to feel, at age thirty-five, increasingly riddled with doubt. Newly confronted with the question of whether to try to conceive before time runs out, she considers the possibility, and the agony, of giving birth.
With the help of a therapist, she embarks on a profound decision-making process that leads her to revisit her upbringing in the evangelical church and training in classical dance. Both Christianity and ballet glorified the instructive and purifying potential of pain while imposing strict ideals of femininity—pressures that fueled an eating disorder and her inner rage.
Over two transformative years marked by fear, desire, grief, and deep uncertainty, she navigates her intense ambivalence in conversation with a diverse group of friends and family across the world. Along the way she examines her complex relationships with her body, her own parents, the religious beliefs she was raised with, and the financial realities of her creative career.
Poetically weaving in history, medicine, and economics, Swell is a searching, honest exploration of what it means for a modern woman to choose motherhood in an unequal society or to leave it behind forever.
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