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193 pages, Hardcover
First published May 30, 2019
‘“The queer character has been so traditionally coded and designated as the monstrous…and I think I was trying to reclaim that monster. There’s freedom in the monster being the norm and not the other.’
‘On the news later, a brief video package. Girls bursting from the venue and howling across the street. The velvet rage of their small mouths, hair torn from their temples. A swollen werewolf moon…one can just make out the boy in the chip shop window, the way he moves his hands up at the breaking of the frontage glass. In a thick swathe, the girls reach out for him grabbing at his legs and neck and elbows pulling him out through the window. The clip ends shortly after that. Before the screaming and the rending. The camera swinging away to capture the mass of a thousand girls all racing forward down the street, a crooked note of music in the air.’
'Anger is an assertion of rights and worth...It is intimacy, acceptance, fearlessness, embodiment, revolt, and reconciliation. Anger is memory and rage. It is rational thought and irrational pain. Anger is freedom...Anger is the expression of hope...Anger is usually about saying "no" in a world where women are conditioned to say almost anything but "no.”'
"We are frenetic with hunger, with wanting, with the repentance of the season. We laugh like hyenas, our heads thrusting forward from our bodies."
"Beneath her dressing gown, she is bloody with mosquito bites. Unrazored beneath the arms, unplucked, unmoistured."
"I had a bad body around that time - creaking joints and difficult digestion, a martyr to mouth ulcers and bleeding gums."
"Beneath my dress, my skin is churning. My legs feel cracked in half, articulated - a spreading and a shifting, as though my bones are springing out of their intended slots."
"When I was twenty-seven, my Sleep stepped out of me like a passenger from a train carriage, looked around my room for several seconds, then sat down in the chair beside my bed."
"The jellyfish come with the morning - a great beaching, bodies black on sand. The ocean empties, a thousand dead and dying invertebrates, jungled tentacles and fine, fragile membranes blanketing the shore two miles in each direction. They are translucent, almost spectral, as though the sea has exorcised its ghosts."
"Nicola watches the gentle pull of outgoing water, the glassy sink and swallow, waves drawing back like lips revealing teeth."
"The sky is gory with stars, like the insides of a gutted night."