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One learns so much about a person when one merely wants to fuck him.
Preverbal, love is the smell of a known body, the touch of a recognized hand, the blurred face in a haze of light. Words come, and love sharpens. Love becomes describable, narratable, relatable. Over time, one love comes to lay atop another, a mother’s love, a father’s love, a lover’s love, a friend’s love, an enemy’s love. This promiscuous mixing of feelings and touches, of smiles and cries in the dark, of half-hushed pleasures and heart-cracking pain, of shared unutterable intimacies and guttural expressions, layer in embellished bricolage. One love coats another, like the clear pages of an
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What the tabloids named me: the “MILF Killer,” the “Butcher Food Critic,” the “Bloody Nympho.” None got it right. You know only enough about me to be sufficiently interested to shell out money to hear me tell my story, or, if you’re cheap, to snag a copy from your public library. You may think you know, but believe me, you don’t.
We women have an emotional wiliness that shellacs us in a glossy patina of caring. We have been raised to take interest in promoting the healthy interior lives of other humans; preparation, I suppose, for taking on the emotional labor of motherhood—or marriage; either way, really. Few women come into maturity unscathed by the suffocating pink press of girlhood, and even psychopaths are touched by the long, frilly arm of feminine expectations. It’s not that women psychopaths don’t exist; it’s that we fake it better than men.
Feminism comes to all things, it seems, but it comes to recognizing homicidal rage the slowest.
In real life, people from your past litter your life like cockroaches, popping out of crevices and scuttling across the dark. In the outside world, you can’t escape fate’s cruel crossing. You turn a corner, and there buying a hot dog is the editor of your college paper; you engage in conversation; you go out for lunch, and then to dinner, and then into bed, and then you love. Love is the languid sigh of death, and no one will ever convince me otherwise. Prison may be the hell of other people, but at least it’s not a hell of people you love.
We sealed the deal with a sloppy kiss and a squelchy fuck.
But every family has secrets, and my family’s was me.
my mouth wets as my cunt once did.
At home with my family, I ate my mother’s organic meals that gave meaning to her life.
I learned that being female is as prefab, thoughtless, soulless, and abjectly capitalist as a Big Mac. It’s not important that it’s real. It’s only important that it’s tasty.
To this day, I can’t look at a Burger King cheeseburger wrapper without feeling my clit twitch.
My philosophy has always been that if you look hard enough, you will find something wicked on nearly every man—everyone has at least one devastating piece of information. I enjoy research, and I found serious dirt, always with supporting evidence.
You can’t be a woman without protection. Condoms fail. Pepper spray can be turned against you. Information almost never does.
You can be too rich and too thin, but you can never know too much.
Information is like a feral cat: what it wants most is to be free and to bite someone. Who am I to stand in the way of the call of the wild.
If I don’t tell my story, it’s as if I’ve died. I’m in prison for life, and I’m not going to die early.
The lifestyle section exists to prescribe a standard of living to which ordinary people should aspire and ultimately fail. The only people to whom a lifestyle comes naturally are the very rich or the exceptionally famous.
“Dorothy,” she said and patted my hand. “You were never my favorite.” You’d expect that to hurt, but it didn’t. She wasn’t my favorite either. She closed her eyes. I kissed her forehead. She hadn’t given up her perfume; she smelled like Chanel No. 5 and necrosis. A couple of days later, she was dead.
I knew that Marco wasn’t smarter than me; I just couldn’t prove his stupidity. It was frustrating.
Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.
Likewise the hair that nestled his penis; giving him a blowjob was like pawing through an Easter basket to find the last candy eggs.
His body looked like a series of parentheses.
The only thing I can do is make my trouble your joy—because here’s the thing about reading my memoir: it will make you feel good about yourself. You feel morally superior even as you identify with me. You slip into the supple skin of a cannibal for nearly three hundred pages, and enjoy it; then you can slough it off, go about your happy, moral business, and feel like you are a better person.
In sum, you and I are the same. You may not admit it aloud, but I know you will read this book and wonder how your lover would taste sautéed with shallots and mushrooms and deglazed with a little red wine. You read, and you wonder, and you know the answer would be delicious. Roll that word around in your mouth and feel the tang of its call.
I took Andrew’s rump roast home. I skinned it, trussed it, rubbed it with olive oil, red wine, thyme, lemon, garlic, and salt, and let it sit sit for a few hours.
“Two thousand eight has been tough for everyone, Chloe.” I said.
I have, in my life, been a girl, a daughter, a student, a woman, a writer, a critic, a friend, a mistress, a lover, and a murderer. Now I’m merely a prisoner. This is the alpha and the omega of my identity. Even being a psychopath takes a distant second seat to being a prisoner. I am a prisoner first, foremost, and always. I’m here for life, which is to say I’m here to die, slowly, incrementally, bits of me failing as the New York State Department of Corrections struggles to keep me alive. It’s a touch paradoxical, really, the fact that one of my few rights as a prisoner is the right to health
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fuckwittery,
If he didn’t fuck me, I’d have to kill him; to kill him, I needed him to trust me enough to be alone with me; for trust, I needed to play his game. This torture wasn’t without its piercing charms.
We’d have oysters and anal, not necessarily in that order, and all would be right with the world. Instead things took another route.
His death was his doing.
Only intellectuals are more gullible than idiots.
Haters gonna hate, and predators are going to predate.
My argaret Lately,
It was a horrid tableau, and I was horrified. Emma was alive and well, but I was cooked.
I’ve always been impatient with my inferiors. It’s a weakness.
He was adequate, a typical mediocre white male whose career advanced because he was not entirely horrible. Women have to work so much harder than men to appear half as convincing.
We talk about love like it’s an involuntary act. We fall into love, like a hole, a puddle, an elevator shaft. We never step mindfully into love. Love, we seem to think, requires a loss of control; love necessitates that vertiginous giving over to gravity; love wants you to have no choice. Your heart thumps because there’s danger and adrenaline in love. You lose yourself in love because you’ve displaced yourself. But dating sites and yentas, arranged marriages and speed dating, advice columns and blind dates, all argue that love is something we can manage, a losing that we can find. I suppose
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The goddess of femininity is cruel to mature women, crushing our brittle bones in her silken, youthful grip. As a girl, when you grow up, you become delectable. As a woman, when you grow old, you turn immaterial—unless you bear children, unless you make art, unless you leave a legacy.
I write this knowing that I will grow old and die in this prison, and I write this so that no one will forget me. I have carved my place in your memory, cut to the quick of American consciousness. How many women—hungry as we are for immutability—can say the same?
