Indelicacy

by Amina Cain

It’s true I did want everything he gave me, but I will die if I can’t write and then I will have wasted my life.

“I don’t care if I marry,” I said. “I want to write.”

If I were honest about who I am more of the time, I would write more honest things.

I was not at a point where I worried about having an ego.

I wanted to talk to Dana about dance and writing and paintings and music, though I didn’t know how to start a conversation like that. I didn’t always find talking easy, and I had never spoken to anyone about these kinds of things before. How should I begin?

We all carry our lives in us, not just our problems or nightmares, but something of what we were before.

The hashish took away my headache and was pleasurable, more pleasurable than drinking.

It was true, I was mean sometimes. But I didn’t have it in me to be kind to someone who saw me only in relation to property and propriety. To be domestic first and then to be a shallow vessel out and about in the world. Didn’t he understand that was not who I was? I wondered why he had chosen me. And why had I chosen him? Had it been for survival, for experience? Both of those things, I guess.

Ultimately, though, this novel is a celebration of writing, and women’s writing in particular.”

In Indelicacy, this story finds itself subordinate to other forms of female pleasure and desire: friendship, sex, dancing, writing, daydreaming.”