February 22, 2022

Here are some quotes from the New Yorker article on Dodie Bellamy that I liked:  

• Taken as a whole, her books assume the shape of an exuberant, jagged mosaic of anecdotes, asides, riffs, and gossip, collectively telling the story of what Bellamy has called the “project of leading The Most Decadent Life Ever Lived By a Girl From Indiana.”
• Bellamy, who left after ten years, now sees that she was drawn to the group by her deep hunger for connection. “I was dysfunctionally shy, a borderline agoraphobic, afraid to talk to salesladies in department stores,” she has written.
• This chorus of Others is yet another way in which Bellamy insists on excess: she understands the self as a jostling horde of influences and intimacies, rather than as a coherent or singular entity.
• In “Mina Harker,” she describes one of her lovers as “a blind noun fumbling about for a seeing-eye verb,” and another as a man with “armpits reeking of musk and meanness [who] decorated his apartment in a style that I could only call ‘boys dorm’ [and] cooked jambalaya with a prepackaged seasoning mix—but when he lay down on my back I felt so hollow, his arms looming on either side . . . his colossal heart pounding my rib cage like a drum.” It’s a character sketch with a distinct emotional arc: the razor-sharp dismissiveness about the lover’s taste ultimately punctured by the desperate satisfaction of their bodies moving together, the raw sentiment of his pounding heart against her rib cage. Her desire wrestles with her frantic cognitive machinery; the mind appraising and rejecting, the body still craving.