I've been asked several times since the book Love and Trouble came out, "Are you still sad?" And I'm not, not in the way I was before. I do feel like it was a season in hell that I passed through. But now I'm in despair and sad and confused every day because of our political situation. So the question is: Is it harder or easier to be sad with a reason?
Claire DedererThe book Love and Trouble is asserting that sexuality lives inside us, and in the culture, and in the people who do things to us - and the forms reflect that.
Claire DedererDrinking and taking drugs. I think there was also a sort of druggie or trance-like nature to the way that I used sex as a child.
Claire DedererI wish I would have been more of a maker. I wish I would have been more of a writer. I wish I would have not subsumed my will to every boy I had a passing fancy about. That's the part that is horrifying.
Claire DedererI carefully lifted out of the pose and spoke up: Uh, Fran? When I'm doing the pose (camel), I have this feeling in my chest, kind of a scary, tight feeling.-Fran was adjusting someone across the room. She had a way of looking like a thoughtful seamstress when she made adjustments: an inch let out here, a seam straightened there, and everything would be just right. She might as well have had pins tucked between her lips and a tape measure around her neck. Without missing a beat or looking up she said, Oh, that's fear. Try the pose again.-Fear. I hadn't even known it was there.
Claire Dederer