On the surface, Lou is an eccentric. She’s a showgirl of sorts; Long Island rough punk rock meets manic Goth. She’s hard, in the street sense, and those who claim to be intimidated by her (and there are many) are responding to this performance. She has a way of throwing her right arm down from the elbow while stepping forward with, “But no, but wait,” or “That is bullshit,” in a voice a little deeper than her usual tone, that throws interlocutors off guard. Three “nos!” for something that excited her, each a little throatier to emphasize the point. She screamed at people at parties for brushing up against her at the wrong time, leggings and cut shirts and giant rings shaking like a costume on a coat hanger, stored in her mother’s closet.  As far as social personalities go, this isn’t a particularly dishonest one, especially for someone in the arts, but beneath it is someone far more vulnerable. Someone unusually comfortable with sincere pleasure for the age of irony, comfortable with joy; the child voice, the days spent in sweaters and bad glasses in a pile of blankets pressing noses together. Beneath the surface is the second layer: someone unusually disposed to terror, to overwhelming migraines and days spent in a pile of blankets paralyzed by fear; a girl tired and sad more than her fair share, worried about money, about her parents, and her brother. This is the girl who wrote delicate, horrifying prose with an intuitive sense of rhythm I still envy

On the Kinds of Love We Fall Into: Polyamory in Theory and Practice | Saturday, February 22, 2014 @ 5:07pm