Love and Trouble

Now that I was here, I wasn’t sure I understood Spiral Jetty at all. Vic, on the other hand, was thinking hard about the jetty. She wasn’t talking, but I could tell by looking at her that she was having Thoughts. She had that stubborn faith that it meant something—another thing I loved about her: She believed everything meant something. Though of c

I don’t think I’ll ever really be better. I’ll always wish I was a dude. I’ll always be a flirt. What was that thing I wrote in my diary? “Completely allied with masculinity—that unbelievably beautiful feeling of ‘I shouldn’t be here, I’m here’ that I get whenever I am around some testosterone.” Male attention will always be of value to me. I’ll al

If the sleeping-bag thingy—say it: assault; say it: molestation—makes a mark on my book with more emphasis than it had in my actual life, is that a lie? Or is it, in fact, a marker, pointing out a truth? Because the more I think and write about Jack Wolf, the more I realize: Sex has often, for me, had to do with power and vulnerability, with victim

The victimhood was like a vehicle that took me closer to what really interested me, what was obsessing me in middle age as it had done in youth: sex. But if I wrote only about assault and predators, I didn’t have to face myself as a sexual person.

The labyrinthine passages of the hotel inspire in me a mood of speculative eroticism. A person could do anything here, and it would pass unremarked. It is its own city of adultery.

Sex was a home and a site of purest simplicity. You just were. It pains me to write these words more than any other words in this book: I liked it. It’s still so hard to say it. The premise of this book is that I was wild and unhappy as a teen, and my unhappiness stemmed from my sex-crazed nature. But what I really felt was what I feel now: Life wa

I look at her and I think . . . it might have worked. She might be both, safe and free, in a way I never was. My daughter is a poised cat with a beautiful, rare giggle and a complex and very well protected interior life. Not protected in a rigid, rampart-y way but protected the way a nature preserve is protected. That’s what her introversion is lik

But don’t all these no-big-deal moments add up to kind of a big deal? I didn’t know, when I was young, about the other girls in the night, all the other girls and the no-big-deal moments that happened to them.

Maybe what’s at work is a kind of interior slut-shaming—if I suggest that such a damaging moment was the cause of my sexual activeness, then I disavow any good feelings I might have around my own sexuality. In other words, victimhood came to shape my own concept of my sexuality. When I sat down to write a memoir of my adolescent sex life, for month