A Lonely Girl Is A Dangerous Thing
29.09.2024 Charlie Trenerry
Jessie Tu’s photograph of a 1983 ‘Film Comment’ magazine
As it turns out, Jessie Tu’s novel is a story of perhaps the most universally experienced facet of womanhood of all. A story of wanting. Of wanting so much, so greatly–so overwhelmingly–to the point of pain. Yearning and grasping for something. For so many things, just out of reach. Not quite knowing what it is exactly we desire. The desperation to find a way to satiate this somehow, to quench ourselves, fulfil this unknowable and gaping need. And so we consume. Food, sex, love, validation. Consuming and consuming and still wasting away with the pain of dissatisfaction.
In the case of this heart-wrenching yet deeply fulfilling debut Novel from Jessie Tu, sex is the order of the day. Every day. Our heroine (for want of a better word), is Jena Lin, a twenty-two year old violin prodigy who already, at her tender age, is considered by herself and the world to be washed up. Career over. She spends her days practising, rehearsing, auditioning to return to what she considers to be her former glory. She uses sex to fill the void left by fame.
A devourable novel, a deep exploration into sex, addiction; and sex addiction. Into feminine desire, the vulnerability and ugliness of it. It is an unflinching yet fragile thing, this book, and centred around a topic, and perspective, I rarely see explored in literature.
“When I wasn’t playing the violin, I filled pages of graphic details…I imagined my body as the most desirable thing, a machine to please men. I knew that they had more power and I saw my body as the only way to get closer to them. In my stories, the sex was always rough and expedient… I’d write my stories and then staple the pages closed. When I’d feel the urge to touch myself, the staples would come undone… Afterwards, my repulsion would compel me to staple the pages together again. I’d promise myself that I’d never do it again. But I’d do it again. And again. And again.”
Featuring page after page of graphic sex, masturbation, and violent pornography, the reader is spared no details. Yet while these themes are perhaps the main thread blatantantly explored in the novel, they are by no means the only or most important. Race, gender, politics, more. The reader is left raw and reeling from what at the end of the day, is a great and unapologetic photograph of life and womanhood, of the pain of humanity, of the fumbling like teenagers in the dark for something tangible to fill the gaps; and something intangible to fill the gaps we don’t want to admit are there.
Graciously lent me by my new, near, and very dear friend Eva, borrowing this book put us in an interesting situation as friends and coworkers, where we knew, for an absolute fact, that if we were reading this on break we were likely reading an explicit description of a sexual or masturbatory act. Luckily we’re both (somewhat) professional, and it never came up, but it sat awkwardly in the back of my mind when she’d walk past. Eva is one of the brightest women I’ve had the privilege to meet in my life, if she was recommending a text as ardently as she did this one, I knew it would likely knock my socks off. And I was absolutely right. Very few recent novels have impacted me, touched me, as deeply as this one has.
“I wonder if there is any way out of this loneliness. If there is a wall I can scale. I wonder if my mother has ever felt this, the lingering, vicious emptiness. I want instructions”.
Certainly not for the light-hearted, and I’d recommend ensuring nobody can read over your shoulder on the train, but I cannot overstate how rewarding a read it is.