Story of O: A Novel

by Pauline Réage

Women at least are fated to resemble, throughout their lives, the children we once were. A woman understands a thousand things which totally escape me. She generally knows how to sew. She knows how to cook. She knows how to decorate an apartment and can tell which styles clash (I’m not saying she knows how to do all these things perfectly, but then I wasn’t a perfect little redskin either). And she knows a lot more besides. She’s comfortable with dogs and cats; she’s able to converse with those half-mad creatures we allow among us, children: she teaches them cosmology and how to behave, to wash their hands and brush their teeth and other basics of hygiene, and she tells them fairy tales; and she has even been known to go so far as to teach them the piano. In short, from earliest childhood we are constantly dreaming of a man who would be all men at once. But it would appear that to each woman is given the capacity to be all women (and all men) at once.