Books

". . . I escaped to the yard, soothed myself in the branches of an oak tree, dangling over periwinkle, looking out for swifts. Sixteen, I reflected, biting into a stolen pie. By this time in her life, my sister Mary had been pregnant. Ovid had dedicated his life to poetry. Queen Elizabeth had seen a suitor beheaded. Romeo and Juliet were dead. Whereas I, Margaret Lucas, was nothing if not in health, no single true adventure to my name."

Everything I wanted and tons of opportunities were in front of my face, but I didn’t understand how to take them. On Gchat I told my dad I was having a hard time, and he said, Anywhere is a prison if you let it be.

But there’s this frustration I feel when I’m sitting with a brilliant and talented friend and I realize that for the past 20 or 30 minutes, we’ve just been talking about rape: our rapes, rape in general, rapists, rape culture, date rape, rape statistics, TV rape, rape apologists, rape flashbacks, celebrity rapists, our rapists.

In these moments, my anger vibrates inside me until it shakes loose and gains buoyancy. It floats up into the air, where it hovers directly above me and my friend and our conversation. There, it does a study for another painting called Brilliant Women Talking About Rape Again.

It’s you I love , she wanted to say. I want us to get married. She touched his shin with her fingers. I even love your shins.

"Whenever I send dirty pictures to my long-distance lover, I always leave them headless. It just seems like a good idea, considering how digital information travels. So these pictures were low-resolution, at an awkward angle, entirely home-made – and for this reason very sexy, if I say so myself."