But what you need to understand, my darling," she whispers, "is that this little taste your daughter has had is a taste of what could be. She’s swallowed it. It’s inside her now.

When the lights go out, the parents cry and ask each other what did he do to her, but the girls are burning with a question of their own: what did she do? What does she know now that makes her so dangerous, like the slow amber leak of a noxious fume?

We throw at female artists this expectation that their work has to speak to the female experience. And if it doesn't, you're letting the side down. Throwing this stumbling block in the way of female artists is counterintuitive.

I remember the embarrassment I felt when Lie With Me came out over ten years ago. There was no good way for me to explain why I shot fiction with pornography, hoping for the best. That initial public embarrassment was likely a kind of useless repression. Because I had no big truth to tell about myself. Now, though, in retrospect, I know why I wrote Lie With Me. It was to sustain this perfect, merciless feeling I first had while spitting art’s extremity into the suckhole of porn. And it’s not embarrassing for me to admit anymore that I was desperate to find meaning in this action.

Unfortunately, by the end of two books I didn’t know any more about female sexuality than when I’d started out. My mercilessness had not blossomed into compassion either.

Is untapped sexual energy in women even still a problem these days? In 1999, I felt that problem as acutely as my shame. And it was this push-pull of pressures that made me transcribe and complicate the getting-fucked female voice - a voice that I found in porn, a voice that was utterly wasted by porn.

Porn needed fiction, I felt. I needed the fight.

Why only one song, one speech, one text at a time?" - "When Our Lips Speak Together

A trip to the picture framer's, with a selection of prints, is the most joyous outing I can imagine. I've spent more money on framing than on anything else I own.