The story of my life doesn’t exist. Does not exist. There’s never any centre to it. No path, no line. There are great spaces where you pretend there used to be someone, but it’s not true, there was no one.

I think a lot about how people currently write about eroticism, and particularly sex.

I was frustrated after reading Intermezzo and ensuing praise for Rooney's ability to write sexual intimacy. I felt concerned for the fear in which people approach the topic now. For Rooney sex often has been, and I suppose is, pure, chaste, and often redemptive. Although there are loose allusions to other less palatable forms of it, she tends to locate herself firmly in the soft pink category (I suppose it makes me sympathetic to Ann Manov's claim that Rooney is writing YA). I find this approach puritanical, and in all honesty dangerous. I think a lot about the younger generation's reactive and regressive approach to sex, the desire for it to be clean and tidy — both emotionally and physically. How do we explain to them that there is no depth there?

I believe that Duras, in contrast, is able to depict sex as it truly is. Her autobiographical writing acknowledges that often eroticism can be tainted by shame and complication. Perhaps that is indeed what makes it erotic. In The Lover, she tackles a number of dark — and often troubling — themes (race, class, and age) that come to inform the power dynamics between her and her older lover, and she still apty communicates the palpable nature of desire despite all this.

The Lover is puzzling, indirect, and poetic. It discusses the turbulence and pain of Duras's immediate family, the complications of her mother and brother's mental health, alongside the experiences of a young girl living in colonial Saigon. Her writing seems to both treat the complexity of her affair at age fifteen and simultaneously avoid it entirely. Often the staccato of her thoughts feels palpable, you can sense the feverish heat and the confusion of girlhood.

I will probably edit this more later.

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