I think that what I knew as a teenager, and what I rediscovered in my mid-forties, was - aside from the primacy of sexual desire and how strongly it …

- Claire Dederer

Drinking and taking drugs. I think there was also a sort of druggie or trance-like nature to the way that I used sex as a child.

- Claire Dederer

Drinking and drugging make it so your reality flies away from you. Your body and your mind are not present. I loved that feeling as a kid. For me, th…

- Claire Dederer

When I was really sad, I would be like a little kid wiggling a loose tooth or touching a sore spot - there were things that I did to make myself sadd…

- Claire Dederer

Your sexuality belongs to you, and think about your own desire.

- Claire Dederer

I carefully lifted out of the pose and spoke up: Uh, Fran? When I'm doing the pose (camel), I have this feeling in my chest, kind of a scary, tight f…

- Claire Dederer

I've been asked several times since the book Love and Trouble came out, "Are you still sad?" And I'm not, not in the way I was before. I do feel like…

- Claire Dederer

I wish I would have been more of a maker. I wish I would have been more of a writer. I wish I would have not subsumed my will to every boy I had a pa…

- Claire Dederer

The patchwork nature of the forms are a reflection of sexuality itself.

- Claire Dederer