Notes from the Snowed Inn

I recently finished reading Wetlands by Charlotte Roche. It was difficult to read and took me a while to get through because I had to keep putting it down.

Wetlands is about ideas like feminine sexuality and scaring nice people with sordid descriptions of things that are sort of taboo - like bodily liquids, female masturbation, and sex. It's a sort of memoir written from the perspective of an 18 year old girl, Helen, who is in the hospital. She is in there for an operation and decides that she will use her stay as a means to get her divorced parents back together. Throughout the novel, Helen goes into much detail about a lot of things that would probably be considered disgusting in polite society, such as her sexual experiences, descriptions of her personal hygiene and bodily excretions. While reading it, I had to keep asking myself exactly what was disturbing about the descriptions. Was it because these are concepts that are not usually addressed? Or that they are somehow not 'allowed'? It's not like everyday you hear conversations about 'smegma' (look it up!) and other body fluids.

At the back of my copy, there is a short interview given by the author to a magazine and in it, she is talking about describing disgusting things. She comments that if you examine something long enough, it ceases to become disgusting. Maybe that is what she is trying to accomplish through her descriptive writing. If we analyze the disgusting enough, we can think about it without having to feel like we need to wash our brains.

And why are these things so disgusting anyway? The author points out that there are a lot of words and phrases for men's sexual parts/actions, but not so for women. She had to invent terms for the story. Why are women's bodies and all they things they are capable of hidden? Why should it be disgusting?

This book was a worldwide bestseller in March of 2008. It was translated from the German. Read this book.

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I went to bake cookies just now and there was no vanilla. Where did it go?? The last time I remember baking cookies was a few months ago and I remember there being a bottle of it then. Did someone drink it? That's like the fourth bottle of vanilla I've bought and only used like a teaspoon or five of before having to buy a new one. F this. I'm starting my own stash.


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