This should be a coming of age story, but our protagonist lives outside of any positive support networks where grief, self harm and substance abuse have left her with detached sense of self loathing. Using sex to seek validation she embarks on an obsessive relationship with a young couple. Scenes are almost exclusively repellent and traumatic as our nameless main character struggles with a lack of self worth, shame and destructive relationships.
I had never been very close with girls in my life unless I was trying to sleep with them. I think it was less a tendency to sexualize every relationship and more that straight women didn’t understand me. I naturally disconnected from them. I wondered if this was because sex, that coagula, was the real undercurrent of life. Maybe I had to be sexually attracted to someone to bother spending time with them. Or maybe I craved a tenderness that could only be traded through opening up and sacrificing the vulnerability of my body to another human being. A kind of closeness that I could get in only one other place, a place that disappeared the day my mother became a widow and retreated into herself.
