THIS STORY IS THE FIRST IN THE SERIES OF SIX BOOKS. All six books are written by women.
This is not an easy story to tell—it has taken more than thirty-five years to write—even though it has been told by one who is considered an easy woman. It is not a simple matter being an easy woman because it’s difficult to be seductive all the time—and that is precisely the appeal of an easy woman. Men know that they can’t have an easy woman at home; she must lead astray, entice, lead away from—these are all definitions of seduction. An easy woman is a woman of ploy. She is a paradigm of ploy-fullness. An easy woman makes you think, makes you question, and makes you believe—and mostly you covet the ease with which she does it.
Golden eras have always welcomed easy women as the charm behind the throne, the beguile-and-beckon of a long-endured marriage, a justified and gentrified departure. She made the king tender, vulnerable, and more understanding; she made the president walk around in her shoes, to see how he liked it, to feel the ache. The not-so-golden times have tried to deport her to vapidity. Perhaps this era, this moment in socio-economic history, cannot support her in quite the accustomed fashion of her predecessors, but she prevails none the less, and in most attentive company. More than you might imagine.
Narrating this story compels me to remember it and to give it substance. I will remember as well as I can in order to share with you this memoir, as discreetly as possible, because if it is sinister to call forth the dead from the tomb, it is even more so to call forth the dead from the living. But you must know about this lethal combination, ease and compliance, seduction and abandonment, and you must beware, and avoid it all the days of your life.
Even now, when I think about him, or quietly whisper his name, if only to myself, it burns my throat and leaves a profoundly sad and bitter aftertaste. May he rest in pieces.