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NotM: Lost Girls – The Afterward
By Corvus | December 27, 2007
This post is very personal. Personal enough that I hesitate to post it. But I think it’s important that I do for at least two major reasons. Firstly, and most importantly, I have learned that silence is rarely a useful response to pain. Secondly, this post is focused on my fabula, that is–the personal story I experienced while reading and writing about Lost Girls and as I consider fabula to be the reason for storytelling in the first place… I would be doing myself a disservice by not sharing mine.
Lost Girls, while truly excellent, was very difficult for me to read and even more difficult to write about. Like an estimated 1 in 4 children, I grew up in an abusive home. The abuse was both physical and sexual in nature. And like many survivors of such an environment, my memories of childhood contain enormous gaps and are riddled with inconsistencies. As a result, I do not know the exact extent of the abuse, how long it went on or how directly involved myself or my sibling were at any given time. Regardless, these experiences, however hidden behind mental shields of fear they may be, have shaped my adult life, my relationships and my sexuality.
I am a very passionate person and it has taken me years, decades in fact, to integrate my passion for life and my natural empathy for people into a constructive and healthy approach to relationships, self and career.
So when I sat down to read Lost Girls, a sexualized retelling of three favorite childhood characters, I did so with no small amount of trepidation. Had it not been written by Alan Moore, I doubt I would have looked twice at the books. Had the art (by Melinda Gebbie) I saw in advance not been so tenderly rendered in warm and comforting colors, I certainly wouldn’t have purchased them. But it was and I did and although I had a difficult time of it, I’m so glad of it.
All three women in the book, Alice, Wendy and Dorothy, had numerous incidents of sexual abuse in their childhood. Abuse from which they escaped, in the moment or over time, into a dreamy fantasy land filled with talking Caterpillars, heartless Tin Men and flying boys. As adults, they each hide their emotional scars in different ways. Wendy is in a passionless marriage with a man who likely had also been sexually abused in his childhood. Alice is alone with her ornate looking glass and her drugs. Dorothy, perhaps the healthiest of them all, travels alone, sleeping openly and freely with any interested men (and women) she meets.
What interesting to me about Lost Girls is that at no time is the matter of sexual abuse turned into a clear, black and white, issue. While the women discuss their shame at the events of their childhood, they are clearly aroused by the retelling of them. I must confess that my emotional responses mirrored theirs. Because while I believe that abuse is a betrayal of childhood, my childhood experiences, however dim they are from my current vantage, defined who I am as a sexually active adult. No matter how much I might try to deny the truth of that, it will always be there. I cannot undo it. What I can do (have done) is learn to function within those parameters, to express my sexuality in a healthy and constructive fashion.
Like the the women in the book, I have found that openness and emotional connections go a long way to healing the pain I’ve tried so long to hide.
What is most powerful about Lost Girls to me is that it does not provide any clear cut (and therefore unbelievable) answers. Each character is a complex mixture of desire and shame. Accepting their past doesn’t miraculously fix their lives and the present’s consequence-free period of sexual abandon is clearly fleeting, albeit transformative.
In the final analysis, I wholeheartedly recommend Lost Girls with the following caveats–you must be able to read it without pre-judgment, you must be willing to confront your own sexuality and, above all, you must be willing to accept that what titillates you and offends you says far more about you than they do the book your holding in your hands.
Tagged:alan-moore, fabula, lost-girls, melinda-gebbie, NotM. | No Comments »