‘Do you want to sit for me?’ he breathes.
You try to still your breath.
So, this is it. You close your eyes, nod, can’t speak. Finally you will learn how love happens, touching and cherishing and nourishing and wanting, you, just you; you will learn where love comes from, how it’s snared, yes, this is the beginning of everything.
You stand, your finger finds the back of the chair, you don’t know what to do next.
He strokes your cheek. It slips down. Over your neck, chest, breast. Something is taking you over, a vast yes. You are angling up your arms and awkwardly unzipping your school uniform, and now he is helping you, he is undressing you, leading you; reaching behind your back, as if this moment will disappear if he doesn’t hurry, stumbling with the clasp and finally slipping off your small, pale bra then kneeling and holding his face to your skin, your quivering skin and with a great sigh burying himself in you, breathing you in. And staying there, staying.
Then his fingers. Slowly, slowly, like a daddy longlegs. Working their way into your white cotton panties.
Spidering inside, to your core, your great warmth; slowly prising your legs apart. You watch him watching, his mouth parted, his breathing. You are intrigued – his face, that you can do this to another person.
Transform them.
The power in that, and you have never felt such power in your life as he undresses you until there is nothing left.
So wet you feel you could crumble with it, now, buckle with his touch. You clutch his hair. Your legs collapse under you. He catches you and lays you on a worn Persian rug on the floor. Stands over you, smiles, assesses. Whips off his t-shirt.
Picks up a paintbrush.
Postscript
And there the manuscript ends. To this date my daughter’s whereabouts are unknown. My grandson’s stroller was also found by the cliff, but no bodies were ever recovered.
P.S.
Insights, Interviews & More …
About the author
2 Meet the Author
3 Nikki Gemmell’s Top Ten Favorite Books
About the book
4 Behind the Scenes
Read on
14 Have You Read?
15 If You Loved This, You’ll Like…
16 Find Out More
About the author
Meet the Author
Nikki Gemmell
The author of the daringly revealing novel The Bride Stripped Bare reveals her loves and fears.
What is your idea of perfect happiness?
Being immersed within my family, somewhere wild by the sea, having just completed a novel I’m satisfied with.
What is your greatest fear?
That my children will be hurt.
Which living person do you most admire?
My husband, for putting up with me.
What objects do you always carry with you?
A notebook, an old Waterman pen and a lipstick.
What single thing would improve the quality of your life?
More sleep.
What is the most important lesson life has taught you?
Don’t let people fool you into giving up; have the courage to follow your heart and do what you really want to do.
Which writer has had the greatest influence on your work?
Michael Ondaatje.
Do you have a favorite children’s book?
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee.
Where is your favorite café/ restaurant?
Anywhere that lets me write. At the moment it’s Starbucks, because I can work for several hours on just a Chai tea and a muffin. I’m sure they loathe customers like me.
Where do you go for inspiration?
Anywhere that’s quiet, where I can be alone.
Do you have any pet hates?
People who are heart sinkers (as opposed to heart lifters): small, ugly-spirited people who want to drag others down.
Which book do you wish you had written?
Jane Eyre.
What are you writing at the moment?
A sequel to The Bride Stripped Bare.
Nikki Gemmell’s Top Ten Favorite Books
1. The Lover
Marguerite Duras
2. Beloved
Toni Morrison
3. Poems
Robert Browning
4. Wuthering Heights
Emily Brontë
5. Atomised
Michel Houellebecq
6. The Great Gatsby
F. Scott Fitzgerald
7. Collected Poems
Les Murray
8. By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept
Elizabeth Smart
9. Coming Through Slaughter
Michael Ondaatje
10. The Man Who Loved Children
Christina Stead
About the book
Behind the Scenes
Is this novel “literary pornography”?
NIKKI GEMMELL: Goodness no. It’s basically a very honest take on sex, from a woman’s perspective. When I think of porn I think of something mechanical, bleak, unreal, ugly, and with an utter absence of tenderness. Porn strips sex of mystery, of reverence and transcendence. It’s sex with no light in it and I wanted to write about sex that’s bursting with light and life. So Bride, in a way, is the opposite of pornography. I hoped to write a book that was startlingly real—with all the messiness and magic of life as we know it.
The Bride Stripped Bare was originally published anonymously, and you were put under siege by the media when you were outed as the novel’s author. You were also criticized by some who thought that, for all its talk of woman’s sexual liberation, this is a very conventional novel, one reviewer suggesting that your protagonist should have liberated herself by getting a divorce lawyer. Does any of this criticism bother you?
NIKKI GEMMELL: I can’t really comment as I didn’t read any of the hoo-ha surrounding the book. This was because I wrote it in a bubble of isolation, and dreamed of just walking away from it when it was published and resuming my life (a little like a mother who’s adopted out a child). When the book came out I tried to stick to the original intention as much as possible, so I have no idea what commentators have said. Perhaps some people just didn’t get it. The whole point of the book is the protagonist’s very conventionality—I wanted her to be any woman and every woman, with a very commonplace story. I hoped that was where the power of the book lay.
All I seem to get are readers’ reactions to the unflinching honesty of the book. It’s an aspect of it that many readers have responded to passionately, and it makes my heart lift. They get it. I’m glad I wrote Bride now, although I certainly wasn’t when my name was first attached to it. But so many women have said to me things like “thank you for writing our words”that it’s made me realize these things needed to be said, by someone.
The title of the novel and its unnamed protagonist, as well as your intention to publish it anonymously, suggest that, for you, anonymity in sexual matters allows for more authenticity. Do you think that anonymity is a sign of liberation or a symptom of repression?
NIKKI GEMMELL: Anonymity is a sign of liberation. It’s hard,in a relationship, to be completely honest, to show your partner your secret self. Vita Sackville-West described herself as an iceberg and said her husband could only see what was above the water’s surface—he had no idea of the huge mass below. She speculated it was the reason their marriage worked. What relationship could survive the shock of absolute candor?
But is Sackville-West right, then? Is the cargo of secrets underneath that iceberg indispensable in relationships, as it is for your bride?
NIKKI GEMMELL: Gabriel García Márquez said that everyone has three lives: a public one, a private one and a secret one. The latter is rarely revealed. With Bride I wanted to strip bare the secret life of an everyday woman, and be utterly ruthless about that. I wanted to reveal the complex underbelly of her sexuality, in all its beauty and uglines
s. I think the jolt of the book lies in the woman’s very ordinariness. She’s not a Catherine Millet by any means. She’s the woman you don’t give a second glance to as she walks down an aisle in the supermarket; the woman who has completely disappeared into being “the little wife.”
For years I’d found it difficult to be completely sexually honest. Why is it still so hard for some women, basking in the glow of so many feminist advances, to be more candid about sex? To say such simple things to our sexual partners as, “No, I didn’t have an orgasm,” or “Sometimes I find it monotonous when you make love to me,” or “Sometimes it hurts.”Why are so many women still so subservient to their partner’s pleasure at the expense of their own? Because we don’t want men to turn away from us, perhaps. Because we want our partners to think we’re someone else. Because sometimes we’re willing to put up with a lot: to snare a relationship, to keep it steady, to have children.
I loved the idea of writing a book that dived under the surface of a woman’s life, a seemingly contentedly married woman, and explored her secret world—with ruthless honesty. In The Bride Stripped Bare, I wanted to say all those things we may think but never say: especially to our lovers. I’d fully intended putting my name to the book when I began it. But six months into the project the text just wasn’t singing—I was censoring myself. Afraid of too much honesty, of showing too much vulnerability. And afraid of hurting people close to me. I’m a wife and a mother of two young boys, not to mention the daughter of two gently bewildered people in their sixties. I didn’t want people judging them.
But I was judging the dishonesty in my own life most of all. The aim was to be as merciless in print as a Chuck Close painting or a Ron Mueck sculpture—but as far as I know, those artists do not often turn their extremely critical eye upon themselves. Now I know why. I’m not someone who’s completely relaxed about nudity; I’ve never been comfortable in a bikini. And like many women in a swimsuit I’m afraid of revealing too much.But when the idea of anonymity came to me, everything clicked. I was suddenly like a woman on a foreign beach who’s confident she doesn’t know a soul and parades her body loudly and joyously without worrying what anyone thinks of her. I’d opened a door to a reckless, exhilarating new world and could say whatever I wanted. I could be ridiculously honest. It felt wonderful, powerful—an enormous relief.
I’m far from unique in finding anonymity liberating when it comes to sex. A survey last year in the Journal of Sex Research found women lied more often than men about sex—and their answers changed dramatically when they believed they were answering anonymously. Embellishments under their own names included reducing the number of partners they’d had and lying about the use of pornography. The respondents were extremely sensitive to social expectations about how they were meant to behave. Anonymity was liberating for them, as it was for me.
When I sat at my writing desk I entered this strange, liberating psychological state of secrecy; it was as if I was stepping out of my everyday self and becoming someone much more confident and in control. Anonymity also meant I wasn’t afraid of The Bride Stripped Bare failing. It seemed such a strange hybrid of novel, memoir, treatise and sex manual, and I wasn’t sure it worked. I was a very new mother at the time and had lost my professional confidence. My brain didn’t work in the way it used to. My previous novel, Love Song, had gone to sixty drafts over several intensive years and I just didn’t have the stamina to work that way again.
Anonymity was also my way of trying to divorce myself from feeling over this book. I’ve always cared too much about my novels and now I have babies to care about. At the moment there’s no room in my heart for both. The plan was to adopt out this new baby in my life, to absolve myself from caring. I didn’t want the burden of worrying about it too much.
I wrote Bride in a kind of trance of exhilaration and glee—it felt incredibly empowering to finally tell the truth.Virginia Woolf described anonymity as a “refuge” for women writers. “Publicity in women is detestable,” she wrote. “Anonymity runs in their blood. The desire to be veiled still possesses them.” I could only write this book by being veiled. It is still difficult to talk about it publicly, eighteen months after being unmasked.
Bride is also a response to another anonymous text, a mysterious seventeenth-century document known as Woeman’s Worth. Its tone is boldly sexual, its honesty shocking, and its authorship disputed. Germaine Greer believes it was written by a man close to his mother; others say it was by an anonymous housewife. I choose to believe the latter, and loved the idea of a twenty-first-century housewife also writing a secret book under the nose of her husband. Saying all those things she may think but never say—even in this sexually liberated day and age. And I’ve discovered, through writing The Bride Stripped Bare, that honesty is the most shocking thing of all.
It’s unusual that your novel is woven together with a four-hundred-year-old book. What were you aiming for by having the bride self-consciously decide that she must respond to it? I mean, there’s more here than just a curious historical angle in an otherwise modern narrative, isn’t there?
NIKKI GEMMELL: I’m fascinated by this book [Woeman’s Worth]. I first read about it in The Times, in an article speculating on the nature of its anonymity. I thought, “Ah-hah, that’s delicious; now I’ve got my key! I’ll write a response to this text. My book, too, will be written by an anonymous housewife.” I loved the boldly subversive, almost cheeky tone of the seventeenth-century text—and I recognized it. The author could only have written these charged, highly subversive sexual declarations in secret. I wanted to say to the author, Hey, it’s four hundred years later and women have come a long way—but actually, not so far in some matters. I was intrigued that this seventeenth-century writer seemed to have more confidence, sexually, than a woman in the twenty-first century who’s lived through several decades of feminist advances, not to mention Sex and the City.
At one point the protagonist refers to “the churn of a secret life” and the “desire to crash catastrophe into your world.” Where does this desire come from? Do you see it as more of an imaginative, and therefore fleeting, inclination or is it a real need that must be acted upon?
NIKKI GEMMELL: My bride is the quintessential “good wife”—a woman who’s lived a marriage of capitulation, who’s now in her mid-thirties and stepping to the side of her own life. It’s as if all the spark and vividness and loudness of her youth is being rubbed out. She’s aware of this but feels powerless to alter the situation. It doesn’t stop her, though, from desiring a way of “crashing catastrophe” into her life in some way. My protagonist eventually finds a way of breaking out, of feeling fully alive and empowered and in control. A lot of women don’t.
Another reason for the anonymity was that I wanted The Bride Stripped Bare to be about every woman and any woman in a sense. I hated the idea of my own name—any individual’s name—being attached to it. For it becomes much easier then to dismiss the book as “just so-and-so’s thoughts.” I dreamed of something much more subversive than that. I loved the idea of a husband, any husband, flipping through Bride in a bookstore and thinking, “Oh my God, did my wife write this? Is this what she really thinks?”
At one point in the novel, the narrator is in bed alone one night and she starts thinking, and what she thinks of—“A group of men watching you being penetrated by a broom handle. You don’t know any of the perpetrators very well. It’s never intimate or tender. It’s filmed. Sometimes women will be watching the penetration; by candlesticks, by animals, sometimes the women will be participating. And the men. Hands will be running over your naked body, parting your legs, probing, slipping inside”—this is a rhetorical land mine. For your otherwise gentle narrator and for those of us living in real time, what does having thoughts that are “never intimate or tender” offer?
NIKKI GEMMELL: I wanted this to be unflinchingly honest about some of the murkier aspects of womanhood—the raw, visceral reality under the seemingly demure exterior. It’s
a deeply secret world. Women do not talk about it with other women, let alone to male partners. “The whole business of eroticism is to strike at the inmost core of the living being … to destroy the self-contained character of the participators as they are in their normal lives,” Georges Bataille wrote. We’re all at our most vulnerable when it comes to sex; it’s the closest we get to revealing our true selves in all our banality, ugliness, brutality and foolishness. The intrigue lies in the glimpses behind the masks we all wear in our public lives.
I’m fascinated by the tension between contradictory erotic forces within women, an ambivalence that’s long cast its spell. Freud cherished it in the Mona Lisa: “[A] contrast between reserve and seduction, and between the most devoted tenderness and a sensuality that is ruthlessly demanding.” I wanted to strip bare an utterly ordinary woman’s secret, dirty world, to reveal her innermost being.
A lot of us can’t face the thought of people seeing us as we really are—for it means losing control of the public persona we’ve so carefully maintained. And we never get closer to the truth of our dark, vulnerable, messy selves than with sex. Perhaps that’s why the prospect of being unmasked as the author of this book was so very difficult to bear. Perhaps if I was alone, without family around me whom I deeply care about, it would have been easier.
At one point she reads a magazine called The Face, where she comes across references to californication, chili-dogging, daisy-chaining and hum jobs. Then she is “Repelled. Horrified. Wet.” Why do you think we might be aroused by sexual practices we’d also call repellent and horrific?
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