One ordinary afternoon in a nameless town, a nameless young woman is at work in a benefits office. Ten minutes later, she is in an underground parking lot, slammed up against a wall, having sex with a stranger.
What made her do this? How can she forget him? These are questions the young woman asks herself as she charts her deepening erotic obsession with painful, sometimes hilarious precision. With the crazy logic and hallucinatory clarity of an exhilarating, terrifying dream, told in chapters as short and surprising as snapshots, True Things About Me hurtles through the terrain of sexual obsession and asks what it is to know oneself and to test the limits of one's desires.
"A perfectly tidy, well-constructed life--complete with job, friends, parents and house slides into the gutter . . . An airy book, full of wonderful spaces. Why can't she stop herself? Is her life so worthless? It's the narrator's insouciance that draws us in, but something darker keeps us reading. We all know how fragile our lives are. You close the book and are relieved that her descent is not y
SUSAN SALTER REYNOLDS, The Los Angeles Times
"Davies unspools her novel in short chapters featuring searing, forensically precise sentences. Every sensation is recorded. . . But what [Davies] does most brilliantly is to give equal time to her narrator's feelings of victimization (fear, self-loathing), as well as to those feelings no one wants to acknowledge--an eager complicity, the way a dangerous person can make us feel alive. In some ways
Rebecca Barry, New York Times Book Review
"Brutal, funny, and exerting the sick fascination of watching a train wreck. One of those rare novels that is genuinely about sex, in all its irrationality and potential for self-destruction."
LIONEL SHRIVER, author of We Need to Talk About Kevin
