MONSTER
"Monster is a shattering, feminist manifesto exploring sexual awakening, motherhood and the power of female rage," they said.
Most of the time I’m a fiction writer, actually, and I write dark, literary, horny stuff. Here’s an excerpt from my last novel, Monster, where my protagonist (who’s a first-time author and has just published a book on conquering an eating disorder) is feeling herself at home.
14.
Sometimes I am exactly the person I said I am in my book, excited to be in my body, having gained back control, no longer a slave to my appetites, satisfied, a woman with no holes that need filling.
I slept well and dreamt of being somewhere hot, oiled and naked, some kind of a dream beach with other oiled, naked bodies in the distance and I awoke with an unearned sensation of softness and sex. I’ve been sleeping on the daybed, in our guest bedroom that doubles as my office. The light in this room is the best in our otherwise dark house, the vine leaves covering the windows filter the sunshine into a happy, lush green, an extension of my garden. The backyard is actually tiny but I’ve planted various climbers, grapes, and berries, and small bushes around the fence to create the illusion of a space, as if it all led to a big secret garden, hidden behind the walls of branches and leaves.
The house is quiet, Ruby out with Voytek at the library or perhaps both of them dead upstairs—anything is possible in this not-yet moment. I stretch and yawn exaggeratedly, like a cartoon princess, I run my sharp nails over my legs, enjoying the sensation, pretending those aren’t my hands. Whose hands? Not yours, but maybe another cartoon princess, maybe some lusty Frazetta girl with round ass and pouty lips, and full, heavy breasts so unlike mine. I close my eyes, conjure her in my bed, dive under the covers, inhale myself. I don’t know if I’m ovulating—I don’t pay attention to times, cycles, moons—but I am deeply myself, turned on, full and swelling everywhere. I am the Frazetta girl and I am me and I am now touching myself all over. I think of all those pillow-to-pillow conversations of university years with awed boys, variations of all those God if I were a woman I would just play with myself all the time, as they would cup and squeeze and marvel. And I would squeeze, and cup and marvel with them, I would feel myself to be in the body but also outside of it. I would, only in those moments, understand what all those you-go-girl girls meant when they would call other women goddesses, I would finally understand the looks that I’d feel lingering on my ass, my thighs, my lips, I would be convinced I’m indeed a miracle and they’re all lucky to see me, to be with me, to have me. To have me! That’s the ultimate luck, such privilege to touch and feel and then dive inside all of this wetness and softness, to inhale my salt and flower smell, to have access to those intimate places only I have access to at all times. To have access to my drippiness, my cuntiness.
I caress this body that I’ve punished and starved, now all that seems like a complete misunderstanding.
This is the mood I was in when I wrote the book, when I felt I finally made peace with what had been bestowed on me by the virtue of having been born a briny, swollen woman. I too, could take pleasure by being inside the space that caused all these sensations for my lovers. I could be their hands.
When I wrote my book, I tried to remember those moments. Thankfully, there were enough of them to form into some kind of a story. I was able to describe it and vouch for it with little essays on having found myself. I would clear my schedule and write and rewrite as much as I could because it was the only time my job didn’t feel like lying for a living.
On bad days. I would sit, immoveable, poking at Monster, the old thought forming and reforming, Let me die. I used to repeat it endlessly, back when all the days were bad, before I learned I’m not a plate of fish and chips.
Regardless, I sat at my beautiful acacia tree desk, heavy so heavy, imported all the way from Africa, a gift to me from Voytek’s older sister. Voytek will ask for it during the separation and I will intend to give it back because I’d sat at that desk and said, Let me die and I scratched inside myself, a little wedge, at first, just a paper-cut, just a tiny grove, I scratched. My fingernail poking in, opening it, riding the groove mindlessly, back and forth, scratch, scratch, thinking of Voytek and the women, then not thinking once the fingernail pierced through. Then I just drilled and drilled. Made circular motions, worked out a circle, a phantom tube. One more place to shove some kind of a dick, another hole to plug.
After Sada Abe killed her lover Kichizō Ishida, she cut off his penis and kept it inside herself for days, until she was found, after a country-wide manhunt. She did it to preserve her favourite part of him after she choked him to death during a sexual act. There was some indication that Ishida consented to his own death, they played increasingly more dangerous sexual games that included asphyxiation, were madly in lust with each other and unable to be together as a proper couple because he was married to some other woman.
At my most despairing, during my postpartum, I had a recurring thought about cutting off Voytek’s penis. But not because I wanted to preserve it, or even stuff it in the new hole I’d worked out in my mind. At first, I truly enjoyed being a new mother. I liked the baby smells and I liked all the routines, even the boredom that everyone seemed to complain about. It didn’t bother me to sacrifice myself to serve this new human being. I finally had a purpose, I could see the results of my work every day as she grew fatter and more aware. Voytek didn’t take to childcare, he spent even more time out of the house. Some nights he would not come home till early hours in the morning. It hurt even though a part of me was relieved he was leaving me alone with the baby. I put spells on his penis, cursed it to not work unless it was near my hole.
As time went on, the routines formed a contained loop from which there was no exit. I could not imagine my life past the baby. Intellectually I understood that this would not last forever but in every other way it seemed to me I was trapped in some kind of a labyrinth of interrupted sleep, colic, shit, rashes, dressing, undressing, endless walks, afternoons in front of a TV on mute. If there ever was a time when I was genuinely crazy, it was then. I saw things that weren’t there, the baby dying and the baby being alive, neither discovery being a happy one. There were times where I questioned if I was a part of an alien experiment, if I lived in a vivarium where I was being tested and observed by celestial creatures. I started dreaming of cutting Voytek’s penis off, as if that would keep him at home. And then, he suddenly came back to me. Seemingly randomly—I said nothing, there was too much to say—but I secretly believe it was my curse, he could sense something, maybe his dick ached in unexplainable ways. We put Ruby in daycare. She was 10 months old. I slept through the night. But the ghost tube inside me moved like a worm, curled, grew, grew scales, eyes, teeth, pussies. I petted the new hole, I caressed it, I loved it. I said I love you, you fucking loser. I kept not doing anything about them, the women, I’m a plate, I’m a plate of fish and chips—I said, a woman who’s never dared to eat chips. But I didn’t yell, I said it quietly, to myself, all the time. Or, I said, Let me die, as if that would help. As if that would shrink the new hole, prevent me from making it bigger. I had also run out of curses, or, more accurately, the violence of them scared me. Every child and witch understands that there are no free curses and I had no way of knowing that the next one wouldn’t cost Ruby’s life—now that she was here, I finally had something to lose.
Now I see that the book was my first escape from Voytek. I wasn’t strong enough to physically leave, but I could hide in the book. And yet, the book let me down—I wrote lies. The only truth would’ve been leaving for real. I worried about that, worried about being found out and called on my lies. I worried there was a woman out there who would see what I was doing, that I was trying to find a place to hide from my real pain. A woman who could fact-check my emotions, expose my cowardice.
But is any memoir ever truthful? A few months before publishing, I talked to a writer friend of Voytek’s, a woman with a new memoir about alcoholism, about how she was still drinking while caring for her new baby. We were at a dinner party. She said the burden of her memoir was too much and she relapsed, while still on tour, talking about overcoming addiction. She gave interviews under the influence, nursed a buzz while pictures were taken of her thoughtful, supposedly sober face next to headlines about the secrecy of being an alcoholic. She always carried a small flask in her purse while she smiled sadly for the camera, and said quotable things about the love for her son being stronger than the urge to drink. I remembered those pictures of her, her big, knowing eyes. It doesn’t matter, the memoirist said, You’re just a writer. People will project their truth onto you either way. Your book is a separate entity. You are not your book. You owe them nothing. So just do the thing and get your money and run. You might feel guilty or like a hypocrite but we’re not our stories, and I promise you that this dichotomy is sustainable—I don’t plan on killing myself over any of it. Besides, you can get better when it’s all over. I did, She said and took a sip of her ginger ale. I wanted to ask her if she had mixed it with anything, if she still carried a flask in her purse.
I try to remember her advice, and, on good days, I am reassured that I am not my book and what other people think about me, about my book, my life, is not my responsibility. And today, despite my husband leaving me or me leaving him, I wake up the way I wake up and the dewy morning sunlight is on me and the house is beautifully empty and I am full in it. I am this more than I am my book, being in the moment like a monk or a serious yoga person, maybe even Margot—the hell, it’s not Margot’s fault she’s a real talent and my husband is a talent scout.
In this generous, optimistic mood, I walk around the kitchen naked, I squeeze my own ass, I pinch my nipples, the quick pain energizes me even more. I walk on my tippy-toes. There’s no flesh hanging lustily around my hips or off my ass but I grab myself as if I were a winding road of a woman, the goddess, the fertility one, the Frazetta girl, again. I run my hands over my belly, touch the delicate insides of my thighs, graze my labia, scratch over the Venus mound.
I imagine I am being watched—by you most of all, I send you all those images of myself in my mind, will them into existence, suspend my disbelief in other dimensions and decide that indeed you are seeing me, my body, in some ESP realm. You are waking up in your bed and you’re struck by sensation after sensation: sight, smell, sound—my elusive wetness, my sighs—and the umami of the almost-touch every longing lover is familiar with, the nostalgic memory of a particular person’s skin on skin that seems so painfully recent, still warm, like a fresh kill, how is it possibly not real?
I allow myself to bask in this strange self-love, I know it’s only momentary, I know that it comes with a crash. I have no right to feel this good, I should be small, shriveled and folded into my depression. I should wait for what’s coming next, the lawyers, the sadness, the angry emails, long silences that are deafening all the joy. And yet, inside me, Monster shuts its eye, lulls itself, calms itself down, collapses back into itself.
I strut back to the daybed and I find my phone, the empty field where I will now punch in the text asking you to meet me somewhere, soon, now, this afternoon, sooner, when is good?
You text back immediately: Now.
I nod at the text and run upstairs to shower, shave, rush to be able to rush out to carry this feeling, even a sliver of it, some whiff of its essence, to you. I want to show you how good I am and I want to feel good when I show you, I want both of us to fawn over me.