an artfully detached, enigmatic voice

I think I have to mute the Simona Vinci in my head. I'm almost done with her short fiction anthology entitled In Every Sense Like Love, and I'm getting more and more disturbed each day. Although she uses the word "love" in her title, the book is more about why love doesn't work. She focuses on obsession, on loss, on the bitterness of the loss, and she's not shy about becoming gross at any moment. I bought this book in 2002 and I remember why I haven't finished it yet. Reading her straight through is like sitting through five root canals one after another.

There are parts in her writing that are kinda feh, though there are many moments that her words are so beautiful that you wonder if her genius only occurs in flashes. I guess because I'm old and jaded, I feel that a lot of her anger is misplaced. Maybe if I had read her a few years earlier, I'd love her. But not now, not really.

What bothers me the most is I could have been her. Maybe not as demented, but the blurb in the back of her book says she has an "artfully detached, enigmatic voice..." A lot of people describe my fiction that way. Well, not in those words, but the "detached" comes up a lot. I'm glad that was established way before I ever discovered Simona. Still, I'm finding it scary. I could have swung that way. I'm scared and relieved.