Swell
Hunger, Disobedience, and Asking Myself if I Wanted Kids
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 having children 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 pain in service of religious and aesthetic ideals, while imposing rigid standards for female bodies and behaviors—pressures that fueled a youthful eating disorder that a potential pregnancy threatens to reactivate.
Over two transformative years marked by fear, grief, love, and deep-seated anger, 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, her conflicting desires, and the realities of her creative career.
Poetically weaving in history, medicine, and culture, Swell is a fiercely honest account of a woman trying to make an authentic reproductive choice while excavating the forces that have shaped what she’s allowed to want.
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