Tamara

“any. Make sure your drink doesn’t get spiked. Don’t drink too much to make yourself vulnerable. Make sure you don’t get an unlicensed cab. Don’t let yourself get picked in the wrong way. Look at this woman in the papers who has had more than three boyfriends – the slut. A guy grabbing your arse in the club is a compliment. A guy telling you you’re ugly is actually him saying he likes you. Do you know how many men are falsely accused of rape? Isn’t it disgusting? Don’t ever lie about something so terrible. We won’t believe you anyway. Go to a festival and see no women onstage, but try to have fun, when it’s not safe to be near the front. You’re so basic to put a flower in your hair. Go to the cinema and see men grow, and women help them grow while wearing next to no clothes and then getting raped and dying. Give it an Oscar. Fuck like a porn star. Make me a sandwich. Stop being difficult. Shut up. Put up. Use this anti-ageing cream. Nobody wants to fuck you any more, Karen. Oh, come on, it’s only a joke.”
― Holly Bourne, Girl Friends

“I reach out and squeeze her hand, and remember everything we’ve lived through together. The normal things we endured as we grew from girls to women. The days in school where boys would line us up in order of our fuckability. The parties where it was normal to lie on top of a semi-conscious girl, do things to her, then call her a slut afterwards. A Christmas number-one song about a pregnant woman being stuffed into the boot of a car and driven off a bridge. Laughing when your male friends made rape jokes. Opening a newspaper and seeing the breasts of a girl who had only just turned legal, dressed in school uniform to make her look underage. Of the childhood films we grew up on, and loved, and knew all the words to, where, at the end, a girl would always get chosen for looking the prettiest compared to all the others. Reading magazines that told you to mirror men’s body language, and hum on their dick when you went down on them, that turned into books about how to get them to commit by not being yourself. Of size zero, and Atkins, and Five-Two, and cabbage soup, and juice cleanses and eat clean. Of pole-dancing lessons as a great way to get fit, and actually, if you want to be really cool, come to the actual strip club too. Of being sexually assaulted when you kissed someone on a dance floor and not thinking about it properly until you are twenty-seven and read a book about how maybe it was wrong. Of being jealous of your friend who got assaulted on the dance floor because why didn’t he pick you to assault? Boys not wanting to be with you unless you fuck them quickly. Boys not wanting to be with you because you fucked them too quickly. Being terrified to walk anywhere in the dark in case the worst thing happens to you, and so your male friend walks you home to keep you safe, and then comes into your bedroom and does the worst thing to you, and now, when you look him up online, he’s engaged to a woman who wears a feminist T-shirt and isn’t going to change her name when they get married. Of learning to have no pubic hair, and how liberating it is to pay thirty-five pounds a month to rip this from your body and lurch up in agony. Rings around famous women’s bodies saying ‘look at this cellulite’, oh, by the way, here is a twenty-quid cream so you don’t get”
― Holly Bourne, Girl Friends

“but I’ve been lucky lucky for each man and each woman has brought me something and left me something, and I no longer must feel like Jeffers behind a stone wall, and I’ve been lucky in another way for what fame I have is largely hidden and quiet and I’ll hardly ever be a Henry Miller with people camping on my front lawn, the gods have been very good to me, they’ve kept me alive and even, still kicking, taking notes, observing, feeling the goodness of good people, feeling the miracle run up my arm like a crazy mouse. such a life, given to me at the age of 48, even though tomorrow does not know is the sweetest of the sweet dreams.”
― Charles Bukowski, Tales of Ordinary Madness

“He wanted to live life in such a way that if a photograph were taken at random, it would be a cool photograph.”
― David Nicholls, One Day