The 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 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 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 DedererWhen I was really sad, I would be like a little kid wiggling a loose tooth or touching a sore spot - there were things that I did to make myself sadder. It was almost as if I were luxuriant in my own melancholy. Looking at the diaries and thinking about my old self, thinking about my lost youth - that was part of that project of making myself totally miserable.
Claire Dederer