{"id":5581,"date":"2013-09-21T23:08:20","date_gmt":"2013-09-22T03:08:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lettersandsodas.com\/books\/?p=5581"},"modified":"2013-09-21T23:08:20","modified_gmt":"2013-09-22T03:08:20","slug":"what-purpose-did-i-serve-in-your-life-by-marie-callowaytyrant-books-2013","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/what-purpose-did-i-serve-in-your-life-by-marie-callowaytyrant-books-2013\/","title":{"rendered":"what purpose did i serve in your life by Marie CallowayTyrant Books, 2013"},"content":{"rendered":"

There’s a piece in what purpose do i serve in your life<\/em> called “cybersex” that consists mostly of screenshots of Facebook chats between Marie Calloway and one or more interlocutors, with the other party’s name\/photo blocked out. In one of these conversations, in which a guy talks about wanting to be rough with her, Marie asks “y do u like those things.” “I dunno,” the guy says, then “It’s hard to know why” and then “Why do you like the things you like?” That question, of what people like and why, comes up in various ways in the book, often in relation to sex but also in regard to art\/writing. (There’s a piece called “criticism” that consists of negative responses to Calloway’s writing collaged on top of pictures of her; in another piece, “jeremy lin,” Calloway’s narrator talks to Tao Lin, I mean, “Jeremy Lin,” about writing in general and Calloway’s writing in particular.) There’s also the question of when people are and aren’t honest about what they like and don’t (and, relatedly, what they want and don’t): at various moments in the book, the narrator pretends to be grossed out by things (being kissed by a guy after he’s gone down on her, a guy fingering her then wiping his fingers on her thighs, her own menstrual blood, the idea of kissing a guy with his semen in her mouth\/passing that semen into his mouth) that she’s not in fact grossed out by (and is sometimes in fact interested in). <\/p>\n

The thirteen pieces in this book are largely centered around sex, but they’re not about<\/em> sex, exactly. They’re about sex as experience, and the power dynamics of sex (does the power lie in female youth and beauty? or male domination?) (not that I actually think that’s an either\/or question and not that I actually think that either of those is quite right, at least not in the kind of sex I have or want to have). They’re about the narrator’s insecurities or past insecurities or sometimes-recurring insecurities, worries about her appearance, worries about being clingy, worries about how to relate to other people.<\/p>\n

I like how dialogue-heavy some of these pieces are, and how awkward\/funny some of those bits of conversation are, like this conversation between the narrator and a client in “sex work experience two”: <\/p>\n

“I thought it’d be alright if I did it with an American, but I guess not.”
\nDid he have some American fetish?
\n“Why an American?
\n“My girlfriend’s from America. She’s living in New York right now. She said that this is the only way it’d be okay.”
\n“If it was with an American?”
\n“No, if I paid for it.<\/em> [\u2026] (30)\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The vision these pieces present of the relations between men and women is often pretty grim. In “sex work experience three,” the narrator thinks: “I am so tired of men pretending that they see me as something other than a whore, that they see any woman as anything other than that<\/em>” (69). In “thank you for touching me,” after having a threesome with two guys who are friends with one another, there’s this: “I wondered what they would say to each other about it later. I wondered if they would make fun of me after they left. I imagined them imitating the sounds of my moans to each other and laughing” (235). In this interview<\/a>, Calloway says,”actually I feel like I\u2019m much more what a lot of liberal feminists would call \u201csex negative\u201d than most women I know,” and that’s a big part of the book: there is lots of sex but not the sense of a lot of pleasure in it: fun, sometimes, and arousal, sometimes, but only sometimes, and lots of shame and anxiety and insecurity. Yet somehow it’s a really compelling read. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There’s a piece in what purpose do i serve in your life called “cybersex” that consists mostly of screenshots of Facebook chats between Marie Calloway and one or more interlocutors, with the other party’s name\/photo blocked out. In one of these conversations, in which a guy talks about wanting to be rough with her, Marie […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5581","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5581","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5581"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5581\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5581"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5581"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5581"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}