Heroines

Начало книги

She was supposed to fuck a god high up on his mountaintop, but she refused. She wouldn’t listen to Apollo’s reasoning. So he cursed her, a life sentence. He said, Sure, you can live forever, as many grains of sand in your hand, but that young lovely body will be gone, you will wrinkle up into nothingness. Who will love you now? Who will listen?

Eventually her body was kept in a jar, and then there was only her voice left.

Only her voice left.

And then not really her voice at all.

The rhythm of my madwomen’s lives: a long scream followed by absolute silence.

At the beginning, I think of endings.

The mad wives of modernism who died in the asylum. Locked away, rendered safe. Forgotten, erased, or rewritten. Vivien(ne) Eliot, whose alter ego in her writing was Sibylla, the voice in the jar that begins her husband’s poem “The Waste Land.” Zelda Fitzgerald, the tarnished golden girl of her husband’s legend, who burned to death in an asylum fire in Asheville, North Carolina. All that remained to identify her: a single charred slipper. Jane Bowles stroked out, later buried in an unmarked grave in Málaga, Spain, while her husband Paul never stopped writing.

Читать дальше →