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After being reminded of that “rock star” incident in her book, I asked a friend if they could send me a copy of Emma Forrest’s “Your Voice In My Head” (After having read it, I personally wouldn’t recommend it. Despite having sympathy for her struggle with mental illness and the appalling way a lot of men treated her, I really don’t like her writing style at all. It’s dry and entirely ego-driven. I think you really have to have an appreciation for her as a person and her numerous famous/infamous boyfriends to find any of it remotely interesting) and I thought some of you might like to know what that contested story says. She’s talking to her therapist in this passage...
“I tell him about my first love, a man for whom I was most emphatically not his first love, or, indeed, not his love at all...He was in a rock band. I was a teenage music journalist. He sent me postcards, sometimes, not often, from tour. He sent me a couple of books. Memoirs of a Revolutionary by Victor Serge, arrived, inscribed with elaborate indifference. When I gave into him, he sighed and said, ‘We’re similar Em. We’ll always be the least attractive people in the room’. A sort of post-coital contempt. After we made love, he’d tell me the reasons why I wasn’t pretty and how he was special for wanting me. That’s when the cutting started.
‘I used to cut myself when I knew I was going to run into him, so I couldn’t take my clothes off. So I wouldn’t lose my heart to him. Though, of course, I already had.’
Dr R looks very, very sad. ‘Did that work?’
‘No, I wanted him so much, I’d go home with him anyway. And he didn’t see the cuts. He never noticed. If he did, he didn’t say anything. He just f**ked me anyway.’ I start to cry, amazed that the man who I thought had vanished ten years earlier, like Brigadoon, can still have this effect...Suddenly I want to cover my mouth afraid of breathing psychological germs, and get out of there, leaving my lovelorn teenage self in London, on her knees, before a man who cannot stand her.”
- ‘Your Voice in my Head’, Emma Forrest
To be honest, it sounds like an amalgam of both James and Richey. Perhaps for dramatic effect, she’s combined the two. I mean, who would be the wiser if she did?
All I can say is, if what she wrote is true, which ever one treated her in this way, was a massive prick! No one deserves to be dehumanized like that!
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