“From the very beginning, and throughout the whole of our affair, I had the privilege of knowing what we all find out in the end: the man we love is a complete stranger.”
literally made me wanna claw my eyes out but great read!
Mar 18, 2025
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When I first started reading this I was in shock because I didn’t know people were allowed to write books like this — so incredibly honest in an almost jarring way. I’m already re-reading it.
The book is only around 65 pages and is a reflection on a passionate affair Annie had with a married man. She was so obsessed with him in, at times, a very relatable way. It feels so intimate, like you’re reading a personal diary.
Feb 4, 2024
“I discover a journey not identical to my life’s path, and yet blazed with the intimate familiarity of my own lived experience. I locate theory—the way it is lived— in motion and in interconnection. Not hard to understand; hard to live.“
- Leslie Feinberg (10th anniversary edition)
heartwrenching from start to finish. a warm hug for someone like me.
i can’t really criticize the writing of this book, just because it’s the uniqueness and importance of this story that sets it apart. it is a story that absolutely needed to be written. what’s even more amazing is that such simple writing could capture the lived intricacies of gender and sexuality in so many shades.
i had never felt seen like this.
Jan 7, 2025
I think I have never known anyone who regarded the sexual connection as quite so unamusing a contract. So dark and febrile and outside the range of the normal did all aspects of this contract seem to Charlotte that she was for example incapable of walking normally across a room in the presence of two men with whom she had slept. Her legs seemed to lock unnaturally into her pelvic bones. Her body went stiff, as if convulsed by the question of who had access to it and who did not. Whenever I saw her with both Victor and Gerardo it struck me that her every movement was freighted with this question. Who had prior claim.Whose call on her was most insistent. To whom did she owe what. If Gerardo's hand brushed hers in front of Victor her face would flush, her eyes drop. If she needed a bottle of wine opened on those dismal valiant occasions when she put on her gray chiffon dress and tried to "entertain" she could never just hand the corkscrew to Gerardo. Nor could she hand the corkscrew to Victor. Instead she would evade the question by opening the wine herself, usually breaking the cork. I recall once telling Charlotte about a village on the Orinoco where female children were ritually cut on the inner thigh by their first sexual partners, the point being to scar the female with the male's totem. Charlotte saw nothing extraordinary in this. "I mean that's pretty much what happens everywhere, isn't it," she said.
"Somebody cuts you? Where it doesn't show?"
Dec 9, 2024
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Apr 1, 2025
It’s the way it lingers in the space between longing and loss, between the weight of history and the ache of what could have been. I feel like I’m always searching for something just out of reach, something that feels like home but never quite is. Similar to O’Connor’s character, I think I understand what it means to carry ghosts and to seek meaning in the ruins.
Mar 11, 2025
it’s been a great soundtrack to my writing this month! no skips 🙂↕️☝🏽
Mar 14, 2025