If I'd got farther into Winterson's Written on the Body I'd have discovered that the narrator's sex is not stated. I assumed it was female because why wouldn't I, and abandoned it after a few pages because it seemed so much in that Lesbian genre of 'let me tell you how I'm helplessly in love with this woman who is fickle/ perverse/ distant/ ambivalent/ straight-up Bad News.' Sita, Nightwood, and possibly that triangle with Marie-Claire Blais which I read too long ago to remember. Thing being, do heterosexual women write like this about their torturing love affairs with no-good men? No names come to mind: the trope is common enough, alas, but a whole book devoted to the affair and nothing else?
And also, obsessive love is dull. Not as dull as jealousy (is why I'm amazed anyone can get through Proust) but pretty damned dull nonetheless. Yes, I've been obsessively in love. It was adolescent and melodramatic and not something I'd ever give the details of to anybody.
