Crazy Salad and Scribble Scribble: Some Things About Women and Notes on Media

I have spent a great deal of my life discovering that my ambitions and fantasies - which I once thought of as totally unique - turn out to be clichés

I have never told anyone the exact details of my particular sex fantasy: it is my only secret and I am not going to divulge it here. I once told almost all of it to my former therapist; he died last year, and when I saw his obituary I felt a great sense of relief: the only person in the world who almost knew how crazy I am was gone and I was safe.

I know that the pendulum often has to swing a few degrees into the wrong direction before righting itself, but it does get wearing sometimes waiting for the center to catch hold.

I wanted more than anything to be something I will never be - feminine, and feminine in the worst way. Submissive. Dependent. Soft spoken. Coquettish. I was no good at all at any of it, no good at being a girl; on the other hand, I am not half bad at being a woman.

I had no jealousy of work, no jealousy of money. I was just jealous of women who took advantage of men, because I didn't know how to do it.

I discovered then that the world I was living in was so much more interesting than the world I was capable of conceiving.

I was nineteen years old, a virgin, going with this woman’s son, this big strange woman who was married to a Lutheran minister in New Hampshire and pretended she was gentile and had this son, by her first husband, this total fool of a son who ran the hero-sandwich concession at Harvard Business School and whom for one moment one December in New Hampshire I said—as much out of politeness as anything else—that I wanted to marry.