Chloe Thurlow's Blog, page 29
July 29, 2013
Losing my Virginity
He turned the video lens to face the bed. I wasn’t watching him, I was drawn to the eye of the camera, struck by its ability to capture this moment. There was doubt and confusion in my head, fear too. I would think about it all later. I would remember always. But now, I laid back on the white bed and watched as he removed his shirt, his jeans, his black boxers.
There was no ceremony, no kissing, no foreplay. I was sopping. I opened my legs and he entered me immediately, pushing hard and jerking upwards at the same time. I heard a SNAP. There was a stinging flash like an electric shock that brought a tear to my eye, and I thought about the camera, how it would preserve that instant, that small tear, the pain as it changed to pleasure and spread over my features.
He moved steadily, rhythmically, up and down, and I moved with him, my back sliding against the bed-cover. My eyes were pressed shut. The soft slap and suck of our bodies pressing together was mesmerizing like waves drawing at a tropical beach. My skin tingled. Everything that had lain dormant came alive. Everything in hibernation was reborn. I was fully awake, fully conscious of the passions within my own unexplored body and mind.
I pushed down on my heels, arched my back like a drawn bow, and drew him up inside me, filling me. He moved like a piston,He was panting like a long distance runner with the winning tape coming into view. Then he gasped for breath. His body stiffened and, that same moment, a shudder of contractions ran through me. I threw my head back and it felt as we climaxed as if a city of lights had been turned on across my nervous system. I could see stars behind my closed eyes. I rose weightlessly from the bed and I was aware vaguely of the sun going down, the room where we lay beneath the white canopy turning slowly to shadow. — excerpt from The House of Strangers.
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July 28, 2013
Dressing
It is the clothes that cover us that stirs desire for what lies beneath. The fig leaves Eve wore in the Garden of Eden were not designed to conceal, but to draw Adam’s eye to what Eve had artfully hidden. Just as flowers come in infinite colors and put out sweet scents to attract the birds and butterflies that pollinate them, we paint our lips pink as an allusion to the moist flush of our sex and perfume our pulses to arouse the hunger in every stranger. A girl in primitive times was the victim of male lust and the guile required to survive and flourish is the mask she subconsciously wears today. Love is war and clothes are our armor.
Half-dressed, as if posing for Helmut Newton, I stand before the open doors of the closet as if it is a sanctuary. Sometimes, when I am depressed, or facing a wall of silence, I creep inside and pull the doors closed behind me. I meditate in this dark silky womb. I tell myself to be positive, to write the right thing because it is the right thing to write. Writing is hard. Persevere. After each word the next word has already burst from its cast and grown wings. All you have to do is catch it and pin it to the page. You find inspiration by writing, not by thinking about what you are going to write. For me, writing and dressing have become analogous. You select words as if picking glass from an injury with tweezers and each piece of clothing so that the ensemble makes an unequivocal statement.
I rifle though a field of blouses and tops before lighting on an ivory cashmere rollneck and a brown leather belt with a snake’s head clasp. I reached for a military style jacket with two rows of brass buttons rising at an angle to wide shoulders with epaulettes. The jacket is cerulean, my favorite shade of blue, neither warm nor cold, the color of the kingfisher. Most of my clothes are a pinch too small and I dress with the vague sense that someone else may later be undressing me. This doesn’t happen very often. I am not that promiscuous. But a girl should always be ready, just in case.
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July 27, 2013
The Only Way is Forward
When I gave up my job describing interiors for a magazine, my Mother told me not to ‘burn my bridges,’ and I started to wonder if that is sound advice. Once burnt, there is no way back. You have crossed the Rubicon, the Styx, the Thames, for that matter. The landscape is new, terrifying. The only way is forward. 
A friend of mine who paints abstracts lost all of her work in a fire. For months she walked around in a funk. Then she rented a new studio. She started again and her paintings were fresher, freer, more layered, more interesting. I have files of unfinished short stories, notebooks of ideas, character descriptions. I keep going back to them as if in the past we might find the future.
But I have a feeling, a deeper instinct, that only when I find the courage to burn all these scribbled notes will the universe reach down and lift me like a fiery phoenix from the ashes. You get trapped into repeating yourself, you plagiarize yourself, you become all those things you condemn in others. Sometimes, I pass a shop window and see my mother in the reflection.
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Review: The Winter Girl
The Winter Girl by Elodie Parkes
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
There is nothing more claustrophobic than a small country town. It’s like living in a large tent on an eternally black night in the middle of nowhere. You are afraid to leave and suffocated if you stay.
That’s how Lily Prescott feels. Lost and stuck, both at the same time. Bruised still from a broken relationship, she had quit her high-pressure job and moved into a house left to her in her grandmother’s will. She has to start again – but can she? And with whom?
The question is weighing on her mind when she meets Starr Forrester – a man whose very name puts you in mind of a sparkling lumberjack, a charming supernova, Indiana Jones crossed with Brad Pitt in Thelma & Louise. You know the type, a charming bad boy like a blazing fire that draws you closer even as you feel your eyebrows burning.
A designer with a thriving business, what Starr Forrester designs is ways and means to create the perfect companion to take him through the long cold nights, a winter girl who, like the snow on the mountaintops, will vanish from his life when the spring sun rises over the distant hills. Will Lily be his winter girl? And, if so, will she still be there when the leaves are growing again on the trees?
Elodie Parkes has created in The Winter Girl a clever, intriguing plot that keeps you glued to the page and you literally do not know what’s going to happen until the last page. A love story with both tender and sensually erotic, this is the second book I’ve read by this engaging author and it will not be the last.
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July 26, 2013
Stranger on the Beach
Meeting a stranger and going to bed together that night can give you that whomph, wow, living in the moment feeling, a sense of daring and wildness. It can also be (and often is) a complete disaster. Summer and writing is a lot like that, what you might call unhappy bed fellows.
In London under leaden skies during the winter, I adore the silent hours before sunrise, the words marching along in neat lines like soldier ants across the screen, camping in paragraphs, stacking up in pages. Here in Spain, the early hours are the only time it’s cool. There’s music in the cafes, a feeling in the night air that anything might happen. And sometimes, it does. I sleep late, roll out of bed and down the hill for a 
cafe con leche and a caracol (Spanish for snail and that’s the shape of the pastry). Then, it’s time for a swim, a laze in the sun with ‘Lional Asbo’, Martin Amis’s disappointing State of England novel, then it’s time for a siesta. End result: thin, tanned, somewhat happy and a zero word count.
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July 24, 2013
Review: Back to School
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Dylan Cross likes to give his female protagonists names that begin with the letter K – and I can see why. There is something emotive in the shape, something both spiky and sensual. Here, we find Kristi waiting for her niece, Katie, to finish school – Kristi’s old high school with its familiar smells and dreamy reminiscences. Kristi feels transported back in time, the power of her memories so strong it seems as if she is truly back in that time, the years peeling away from her face and body the same as they peel away from her mind. She finds her old locker and can barely believe there is a bottle of spirits waiting there to be unscrewed and sipped…
“Just what do you think you are doing.”
The voice doesn’t shake her out of the nostalgia, but takes her down, down as if into the depths of the past and she becomes what Mr Smith, the dean of discipline, believes she is: a disrespectful, class-skipping, booze-addled student who needs a serious taste of discipline. Driven partly by vanity, Kristi at 31 likes being taken for an 18 year old, and partly by a sense of an explorer entering the unknown, she follows Mr Smith into his office with a prickly feeling over the soft flesh of her posterior and a sense that her life is about to change…perhaps forever.
Dylan Cross is the master of discipline and in “Back to School” we find him at his dominant best.
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July 2, 2013
Review: Trilby
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Beauty Without Talent
From school with strict cheerless nuns to university, where I came under the severe hand of my tutor, I identified with the eponymous Trilby the moment I opened the pages of George du Maurier’s novel of domination and submission, a book with an undercurrent of eroticism that can only have slipped by the censors by its sly subtlety and incisive examination of the human condition.
Set in the Paris Bohemia of the 1850s, it is in Trilby that we meet Svengali, a name from fiction that has found its way into the language, like quixotic, Scrooge and Catch 22. Svengali is a music teacher and would be impresario with a perfect ear and an eye for the main chance. Trilby O’Ferrall works as a laundress and artists’ model. She is young, pretty and vulnerable. All the men she meets fall in love with her, which forms the body of the book. But when she enters the orbit of Svengali, he becomes obsessed with making her his protégée and a singing star; a Diva.
Although Trilby is tone deaf, she is susceptible to hypnosis, another of Svengali’s dark arts. Under his power, she performs in a trance. They travel across Europe, making their fortune until Svengali has a heart attack during a concert in London and Trilby, as she sings on, is shown to be talentless without the maestro’s influence. Having been acclaimed in high society and lived among the élite, Trilby O’Ferrall returns to her former role in the laundry aware that her only gift is her fading prettiness, the fate of most women.
Written in the 1890s, the writing is sometimes overblown and prosaic; overlook this and the novel remains a delight.
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June 19, 2013
Self-Closing Door
Seagulls are self-confident to the point of arrogance. House sitting here in Spain, a nest on the roof contains two baby gulls and the fraught parents dive kamikaze like over the terrace every time I sit down to sip a glass of cava (Spanish champagne for those who don’t know, same grape, better taste due to more sun). I dreamed of sitting on that terrace writing my new novel long longhand like a Zen monk and the squawking gulls have forced me back inside – where it’s easier to concentrate. Is there a lesson here? Lao-tsu wrote: a self-closing door needs no bolt, and I have always wondered what it meant.
June 17, 2013
Crisis & Migration
I walk among the pine and olive trees thinking of titles for my new novel - it is a romance with erotic undertones, but a romance first, and I am just a little bit jealous of Katie, the "I" character, who has found Tom, the volunteer doctor who runs an orphanage and seems almost too good to be true. Is he?
