Read too young, perhaps.
A summer afternoon, a thunderstorm, no television.
A raging ocean outside.
A dusty old trunk of books, alone in my grandmother’s attic, waiting for the moment I could return to the beach.
At the very bottom.
Under La Bicyclette Bleue.
Below Agatha Christie and Georges Simenon.
Suddenly Her.
Suddenly O.
It wasn’t that cover.
But the mystery was already there.
O? Like me?
O? Who is that?
O like Ophélie?
O like an imprint.
O.
A book that became my comfort object.
My secret, unsettling refuge.
The voice of O has never left me.
It reshapes itself—like a river, like a shoreline—in my mind whenever it wanders, whenever it wakes.
O when I write Ophélie Deslys.
Searching for the same freedom.
Between light and shadow.
Desire and flesh.
O. I add a D. Out of modesty.
Out of delight.
Because desire is feminine too.
I write from O,
but I do not write O.
Because I would never be done rereading it.
Nor rewriting it.
Story of O, Pauline Réage
