“The first time I ever smoked a peach cigarette, I was wearing a dinosaur suit and sitting on my friend’s balcony in a Tokyo suburb.”
“Batman is a game where we go into the spare room and lock the door and strip to our knickers. One girl lies on the bed and the other girl balances on the windowsill with a blanket around her shoulder like a cape and whispers Batman.”
“An unread book has the potential to be the greatest book I have ever read. Any unread book could change my life.”
“If I were a willowy, elfin 17 year-old my age would be marketable. I’d be on the cover of Poets & Writers no matter how mediocre my book was, just because holy shit, a 17-year old novelist.”
“When I was 16, I had a website. It was dreadful, obviously. I was into kinderwhore and riot grrrl and fairytales and confessional, but I did it all in this awful cack-handed teenage way, so it was just bad poetry, lists of my favourite song lyrics, and photos of me reading books in my underwear or pouting in torn slip dresses and a tiara (see photographic evidence).”
“We wrote poems for each other and made them into artwork with smudged pastels and Barbie plasters and the blades from our Lady Bics. We imagined we were part of the great heritage of lesbian artists. We were terribly misunderstood.”
“Back then, I wanted attention. I wanted people to look at me and think that I was worth their time. Taking my clothes off seemed like a short cut: everyone wants to look at nude 18 year-olds. Now I don’t get naked for attention, but I do wonder whether my writing is based on the same need for recognition.”
“I often find that the book I have read is somehow not as exciting as the book I had imagined reading.”
“I knew what sex was in the way that most eleven year-olds know what sex is: cartoonish illustrations in a ‘My Body’ book, whispered exchanges in the playground, the half-naked women on the front of my father’s collection of sci-fi novels, the time I crept downstairs when my parents were having a dinner party and watched Sliver from behind a cushion. This was not enough. I was curious.”
“I am a lazy intellectual, an academic slacker. A dilettante who likes to know a little bit about everything. I love to learn things, but I hate to read textbooks.”
“It’s not that I’ll reject your story just because I don’t like you; it’s that the presence of certain elements (such as “you girls,” or dogs, or funerals) set off my Bad Writer Radar. Rejection is nothing personal, except that this time maybe it is a bit personal, because you just made it personal.”
“The problem with fairy tales is that they are more than just old stories. They’re mythic cultural knowledge: they have been removed from their sociological roots to float in a timeless limbo, seeping into all of us since childhood.”
“My girlfriend and I, still wrapped up in honeymoon love, had no interest in the company of others. We stocked up on straight-to-the-oven lamb chops, DVDs of true crime documentaries, and a small forest of alcohol bottles. It was going to be a good night.”
“I’d write about you, and I wouldn’t even ask you whether it was okay.”
“I like to read. I need to read. But I’ve got shit to do.”
“Chain-reading paperbacks is no more inherently intellectual than watching all the Back to the Future films in one go.”
“I’m 18, I’m standing under a spotlight with no clothes on, and the photographer is pointing at my thighs.
This is what I mean, he says in a Czech accent. I must airbrush this now! You must start jogging more.”
“Playing around with prose sestinas, cobbling together screenplays for my filmmaker brother, writing a new NaNoWriMo novel every year — surely they weren’t going to give me letters after my name for this. It wasn’t work. I could do this shit forever, if only some sucker would pay me.”
“Like most lesbians, I don’t look stereotypically gay, which can lead to some confusing exchanges.”
“Every week I work as a waitress to earn enough to buy a little free
time for writing, and then I spend my hard-won Wednesday morning playing silly Facebook games and making unnecessarily complicated plans for lunch.”
“I wrote about how other people had eaten my heart, and the hearts I ate in revenge. It was uncomfortable to write and even more uncomfortable to read. It was my soft underbelly tilted up to the light; my dark heart made into words. But it was not exactly true.”
“I liked to think I was the only eight year old in the world who read books about axes and naked ladies.”
“It’s 1 a.m. at the launch of a queer feminist zine called Lock Up Your Daughters and I’m starting to get bored, so I lean over to my friend Paul, who has tattoos all down his arms of cherry blossoms and tea-cups, and I say I like that girl.”