Magdalene Launderies

"I'll never talk about it at this level again, but let me ask you. Why have I survived that kind of night, when other women didn't? How am I alive to tell you this tale when he was ready to slice me up? In the song I say it was Me and a Gun but it wasn't a gun. It was a knife he had. And the idea was to take me to his friends and cut me up, and he kept telling me that, for hours. And if he hadn't needed more drugs I would have been just one more news report, where you see the parents grieving for their daughter. And I was singing hymns, as I say in the song, because he told me to. I sang to stay alive. Yet I survived that torture, which left me urinating all over myself and left me paralyzed for years. That's what that night was all about, mutilation, more than violence through sex. I really do feel as though I was psychologically mutilated that night and that now I'm trying to put the pieces back together again. Through love, not hatred. And through my music. My strength has been to open again, to life, and my victory is the fact that, despite it all, I kept alive my vulnerability."

Tori Amos

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There is not much left to write in the first draft of the book. The climax is half-finished, and it was much easier to write than I thought, even though it will be better when I have finished the second draft and have the weight of everything else on my finger-tips.

It feels like only a few weeks since I started writing when everything was vague and conceptual and shady and just thinking about all the things I had to think through, all the times I thought:"What the fuck is the point of this? who the fuck are you, with your limited life experience to sit down and write something that is supposed to be real?", well, it's just numbing.

So here's to me!

Cheers!