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Even on weekends, I would sit at my desk, sipping on a screwdriver while cutting arguments out of my skull, until I would hear my friends shout to me through my open windows, telling me that they had come to rescue me: it was time to go out and get fucked up.

Watch a video of Chloe Caldwell reading at the San Francisco Public Library.

A few months ago I woke up one morning in bed with this dude with whom I was having the most frustrating and confusing non-relationship in the history of ever, and he rolled over, apropos of nothing, and said, “you have the tiniest nipples I have ever seen.” Then he rolled over and started texting someone; probably a woman with a normal breast-to-nipple-to-areola ratio. Well isn’t that just exactly what I wanted to hear at eight o’clock on a Monday morning while my chest was still clutched with the panic that I might have leaked leftover vaginal goo into his crisp white sheets overnight? His tone wasn’t necessarily negative, but it wasn’t like he was fucking cooing over their miniscule adorableness, either.

Notice is brilliant at capturing the equilibrium the sex worker strives to maintain, down to the moment to moment adjustments I make, especially during a truly bad call, so I can keep my remove: How long can I keep the leering mouth breathing client happy just licking me rather than having him want me to go down on his pruney, old man smelling cock?

Notice shouldn’t scare me. The novel is, in subject, like the stories of my second life—like Law and Order: SVU and the canon of Catherine Breillat; like Lolita, Story of O, Freud, and Kathy Acker; like the Davids: Lynch and Cronenberg. Of sex and violent death.

I first read Notice in 2003, sitting at Café Pick Me Up, a couple weeks after moving back to New York. I was adrift. My family was back in San Francisco, and so was my soon-to-be ex-boyfriend.

When Olga, the protagonist of Elena Ferrante’s The Days of Abandonment, is first confronted with her husband Mario’s announcement that he’s leaving, she reacts to his “merciless rationality” with composure. We assume, as she assumes, that she loved him. The initial shock of reading about the days of Olga’s abandonment is a feeling that settles, over the course of the book, into a kind of pleasure.

This is Ruth’s introduction to our November pick, The Terrible Girls. A few weeks ago at a dinner party I (Ruth) accidentally started an argument with a stranger over Mortals, a novel by Norman Rush, which I confessed to “hate-reading.” Jonathan (the stranger) happens to be a Norman Rush expert—this sort of bad luck is mine and mine alone, I feel—and so I found myself in the awkward position of having to logically and instantly defend an opinion I had formed slowly and emotionally. Mortals (spoiler alert!) is about the dissolution of a long, loving, and—it grosses me out to type this, but it’s a central concern—sexually satisfying marriage.

SK: In some ways, I come a little unprepared. There are two things I wanted to bring you but they’re just about me so they’re not very significant, but it’s interesting for me. The original edition of After Claude, which Iris inscribed to me—a very, very nice inscription, It gets me a little tearful sometimes.

Here’s a quote from Emily Cooke’s recent essay on Dorothy Baker in the LRB. It’s paywalled on their website, but you can read it with a day pass (or subscribe to the LRB!)

“In 1962, the daughter of a friend of Dorothy Baker’s went up to her house in Terra Bella, California, to interview the 55-year-old novelist. ‘What is your real purpose in this thing?’ Baker said as the tape began to roll.