"these old tomcat feelings you don’t understand"

How could we understand? Us women, with our natural fidelity and nesting instincts; our softness, our cleanness, our patience and leftbehindness. What could we know about rambling feet and wandering eyes? About dark urges and dive bars? About prolific desire, about grit, sex and recklessness? About what it is to kick around the possibility of love as though it were a bottle of 100 proof moonshine—an enticing risk, guaranteed to intoxicate, likely to destroy.

"...part of my story has been an urgent wish to have the same shambling adventures as the men in my life. I wanted to jump off balconies and stagger through the streets of some foreign town, shirt stained with blood. I wanted to pour Bushmill’s down my throat and light myself on fire. I knew every word to the song “Pasties and a G String,” a winking, bawdy ode to the low-rent freedom of live nude girls. In the year after college, I went with a male friend to a strip club — one of those junky roadside joints — and I had this idea that I would run my eyes all over those women, I would devour them, but instead I felt strange and wrong inside, and I made him give all his dollar bills to the heavy women and the older women no one paid attention to, and I went home that night and lay alone in bed feeling so blue. (Because I wasn’t one of those women? Because they were?)" (Here.)