Nicole Field’s Reviews > Girlfag: A Life Told in Sex and Musicals > Status Update

"Abandoned. What an odd word... a word of things broken: connections, deals, rules. Something you had that you lost. Or, more precisely, something that had *you*, that let you go."

'Sometimes, you settle for what you can get. Sometimes, that's enough."

"Sharon and I staggered along for many months in the miserable halting dance of one person who is in love and another who would like to be but isn't."

"Harold and Vita both took lovers throughout their lives, mostly, but not exclusively, of their own genders; he called her affairs "your muddles," she called his "your fun"."

"Vita Sackville-West discovered women much earlier than I did, at nineteen -- specifically, her childhood companion Rosamund Grosvenor, who had been brought over as a playmate to console six-year-old Vita when her father left for the South African war. By 1911, she writes, "we were inseparable, and moreover were living on terms of the greatest possible intimacy" ."

"Somewhere there were places where men had other men as wives."

"The erotic drive involved in writing a hundred-thousand-word novel, solely for one's own pleasure and the pleasure of sharing with like-minded others, is difficult for me to imagine; most people commit that kind of energy to having sex, not to writing about it. But Cecilia tells me that for her, and for many others, "Slash *is* our sexuality.""

"Flirting with gay men is lighthearted, consequence-free, an easy ritual.
When you try to flirt with straight guys, there's always the chance that the flirtation might turn into actual sex. Flirtation becomes a kind of playing chicken -- how far can you take it before someone makes an actual proposal, before someone has to say yes or no?"

I am a sadomasochist. I am currently in my third and fourth long-term relationships. I am not yet a grandmother but I bake like one. I listen to a lot of show tunes.
You may now feel that you understand me less than you did before you began this introduction. That happens a lot when I try to explain myself." -- You and me both, sister.