A Certain Hunger

“Preverbal, love is the smell of a known body, the touch of a recognized hand, the blurred face in a haze of light. Words come, and love sharpens. Love becomes describable, narratable, relatable. Over time, one love comes to lay atop another, a mother's love, a father's love, a lover's love, a friend's love, an enemy's love. This promiscuous mixing of feelings and touches, of smiles and cries in the dark, of half-pushed pleasures and heart-cracking pain, of shared unutterable intimacies and guttural expressions, layer in embellished bricolage. One love coats another, like the clear pages of an anatomy textbook, drawing pictures of things we can only ever see in fractions. With the coming of words, love writes and is then overwritten; love is marginalia illegibly scrawled in your own illegible hand. In time, love becomes a dense manuscript, a palimpsest of inscrutable, epic proportions, one love is overlaying another, thick and hot and stinking of beds. It's an unreadable mess.”

Dorothy’s early description of love becomes more significant when she finds herself in love with Andrew. Once someone has lived through several romantic encounters, their notions of love overlap and distort, making it difficult to remember which partners led to which emotions. However, on closer examination, her description is self-contradictory and begins to look more like an attempt to impress with the cleverness of its delivery rather than the profundity of its message.

“It’s such an intimate thing, to witness another’s death. Orgasms are a dime a dozen. Any old human woman can see a man orgasm. We so rarely get to see them die; it has been my greatest gift and my most divine privilege.”

Dorothy describes her greatest pleasures in terms of appetites, but they are all tied to a type of intimacy. She has no shortage of lovers, but sexual gratification is not the pinnacle of intimacy for her. Murder is so much rarer than sex that its scarcity is precious to her. She describes the event of watching men die as something worth pursuing, a gift that most women deny themselves.

“Stories are, like justice or a skyscraper, things that humans fabricate.”

As Dorothy thinks about food in prison, she contemplates the nature of storytelling. She makes no distinction between the stories that people tell themselves and the stories they tell one another. The quote illustrates her amoral approach to life and her cynicism with human nature. She doesn’t trust people because she knows how easy it is to trick people.