Women
‘A beautiful read / a perfect primer for an explosive lesbian affair / an essential truth’ Lena Dunham‘I have meditated repeatedly on what it was about Finn that had me so dismantled.'A young woman moves from the countryside to the city.Inexplicably, inexorably and immediately, she falls in love with another woman for the first time in her life.Finn is nineteen years older than her, wears men’s clothes, has a cocky smirk of a smile – and a long-term girlfriend.With precision, wit and tenderness, Women charts the frenzy and the fall out of love.
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4th Estate
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
This eBook first published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2018
Copyright © Chloe Caldwell 2014
Cover design and illustration
by Anna Morrison
Chloe Caldwell asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins
Source ISBN: 9780008254919
Ebook Edition © August 2017 ISBN: 9780008254926
Version: 2018-02-01
Contents
Dedication
Epigraph
Acknowledgements
About the Author
About the Publisher
What I know for certain about this time: My pupils were expanding. I never figured out if this was a symptom of falling in love or a side effect of the Chinese herbs my transgender friend Nathan was hooking me up with. Either way, I was stoked because I read an article that explained you are perceived as prettier when your pupils are dilated. A few years later, my pupils have shrunk back to their regular size, staring back at me, sometimes small as pinheads, each morning. But I don’t take the Chinese herbs anymore either, so, who can really know.
Sometimes I wonder what it is I could tell you about her for my job here to be done. I am looking for a shortcut – something I could say that would effortlessly untangle the ball of yarn I am trying to untangle here on these pages. But that would be asking too much from you. It wasn’t you who loved her, or thought you loved her. I wonder what I could write that would help you to understand that it is profoundly easy to fall in love with an olive-skinned woman that touches you just so, and who has a tattoo of a quote from Orlando trailing down her back. Show me your tattoo again, I’d say in bed. She’d pull up the bottom of her shirt, and I’d trace my fingers over the cursive words by Virginia Woolf that read: Love, the poet said, is a woman’s whole existence.
My mother still lives in the house in which I was raised – a woodland cottage in a small hamlet in the country. As a child, I adored the woods and spent the days playing in streams, sitting on my singing rock making up songs, crowning my head with dandelions and using berries as lipstick. I loved chewing on mint leaves and chives. My mom showed me how to soak Queen Anne’s lace in food coloring overnight and we’d wake in the morning to bright pink and blue flowers. We often took walks in the woods, sometimes together, sometimes alone. In my teenage years, it was inevitable that after an argument, the door would slam and one of us would trudge off toward the woods. When I was sixteen, a lesbian couple in their forties built a house across the woods from us. This was significant as we’d never had any neighbors. The woods behind the house were chaotic. Walking through you were bound to return home with scratches and tick bites. But when the lesbians moved in, they landscaped the woods so that there would be a loop on which they were able to walk their dogs. Right away, my mom took to walking the circle as well. We’d leave notes for each other on the kitchen counter, Went to walk the circle. The lesbians were an intriguing couple, one was wealthy and of some notoriety, the other a struggling artist. My mom often chided me when I was a teenager for calling them ‘the lesbians’ but the only reason I called them that was because she did.
