Tamara Faith Berger > Quotes

“I remember the embarrassment I felt when Lie With Me came out over ten years ago. There was no good way for me to explain why I shot fiction with pornography, hoping for the best. That initial public embarrassment was likely a kind of useless repression. Because I had no big truth to tell about myself. Now, though, in retrospect, I know why I wrote Lie With Me. It was to sustain this perfect, merciless feeling I first had while spitting art’s extremity into the suckhole of porn. And it’s not embarrassing for me to admit anymore that I was desperate to find meaning in this action.

Unfortunately, by the end of two books I didn’t know any more about female sexuality than when I’d started out. My mercilessness had not blossomed into compassion either.

Is untapped sexual energy in women even still a problem these days? In 1999, I felt that problem as acutely as my shame. And it was this push-pull of pressures that made me transcribe and complicate the getting-fucked female voice - a voice that I found in porn, a voice that was utterly wasted by porn.

Porn needed fiction, I felt. I needed the fight.”
― Tamara Faith Berger, Little Cat

“Masochism seemed to make sense to me in terms of the struggle for self-consciousness of the slave in the struggle unto death.
'I feel like sex, I mean, giving myself, helps me. Giving my whole self to someone until I forget who I am helps me deal with my problems.”
― Tamara Faith Berger, Maidenhead

“I think that it’s a space that there are a lot of projections onto—the soon-to-be sexualized and already-sexualized young woman. There are so many outside perceptions grafted onto her, that she feels all at once completely blank and completely full. I noticed that a lot in your book, as well, this repetition of a shallowness. But there is also depth in the constant repetition of this shallowness.”
― Tamara Faith Berger

“My essay had evolved into thinking about fucking. You could be raped a thousand times and still be a virgin. I was writing about fucking by a master and fucking as a slave, about Hegel, the comfort women and teenage porno stars. Ms. Bain and Mr. Rotowsky could fail me, I didn’t care. I’d pass just with the bibliography. I was compiling a list of every single book I’d read or that I wanted to read that was about power and sex. High school should have a whole fucking course on just this. I was helping the school make curriculum…

I was writing my essay, writing easily now. I didn’t have a reader anymore like Lee or Chris but I imagined that I was writing for them both. Maybe I was writing for anyone who could fucking stand me.”
― Tamara Faith Berger, Maidenhead

“I always wanted to be the prettiest person in a room', I began my story to Aaron and Wils, feeling desperate for their attention, like a runaway. Lee was prettier than me. She was a better girlfirend. 'Or I always wanted to look like other girls, someone else, not myself, there was always someone who looked better and more beautiful than me.'

Aaron took a swing of rum. 'I think you're the most beautiful girl I've ever seen,' he said.

'Once in Grade 8, listen to this, you guys: I slapped my best friend Jen accross the face. She was the most popular, most good-looking girl in the school. I slapped her because she was laughing hysterically. She'd started laughing so hard at her own story about some guy, I don't even remember what the story was, and her laughs became yaps, like hysterical air-swallowing. I just wanted her to shut up so badly that I slapped her. Her ponytail swung from side to side but even that didn't stop her yapping for a second. You get what happened? I mean, right after I smacked her? She started really laughinh after I slapped her cheek. My slapping had actually made things worse. I mean, she couldn't stop that terrible laughing-crying-yapping for another ten minutes!'

Wils was smiling at my story but Aaron was grim.

'It felt good to slap her', I said. 'To slap the most beautiful girl to attempt to stop her self-destruction...”
― Tamara Faith Berger, Maidenhead

“I'd be more open than a book too. My spine would crack, I'd fall out in halves.”
― Tamara Faith Berger, Maidenhead

“And then women will fuck men instead of men fucking them. And then this place can be burned to the ground.”
― Tamara Faith Berger, Little Cat

“My mother kept calling me out of myself. She wanted to show me a picture, the first picture from the slave-ship exhibition. ‘This is unbelievable,’ she said. ‘Myra, you have to see this, this is unbelievable.’ I cringed at how fast she was talking. Why unbelievable? This all actually happened! Why is this all so hard to believe?”
― Tamara Faith Berger, Maidenhead

“But maybe when you never say a thing, your thoughts spread like mould.”
― Tamara Faith Berger, Little Cat

“According to Hegel, the slave fully acknowledges the self-consciousness of the master and she dissolves herself or upholds herself as their relationship dictates and evolves to the struggle unto death. Although this struggle is a failure, according to Hegel, if someone actually dies.”
― Tamara Faith Berger, Maidenhead

“At the beach, college girls lay in groups on the sand around buckets of drinks, their bums curved up like fruits. Mine didn’t do that.”
― Tamara Faith Berger, Maidenhead

“I was thinking: Girls get scared way too often. Girls get stupidly scared. I was not scared.

Telling myself not to be scared kind of worked.”
― Tamara Faith Berger, Maidenhead

“The slave's self-consciousness, according to Hegel, not the master's, sublates into Absolute Knowledge.
This was changing everything for me. Sublation meant cancelling out and preservation; both, together, at the same time. You could get rid of something and protect it too. I realized that I wanted to sublate myself to Elijah. I wanted to be consumed by him and elevated by him and preserved in the process. I didn't know how to do this. This didn't seem inevitable. Did I have to struggle to the death?”
― Tamara Faith Berger, Maidenhead

“All men think that a woman walking alone at night is a whore.”
― Tamara Faith Berger, Little Cat