From Publishers Weekly
Art-rocker, filmmaker and '80s doyenne Lunch opens this confession, first published in the UK in 1997, with an account of her childhood sexual abuse: "So twisted by men, a man, my father, that I became like one." She's not looking for healing or sympathy, but to explain her transformation into a sexual predator. From Lunch's arrival in pre-AIDS New York as a teenager, she matter-of-factly "targets marks," trades her body for rooms and drugs, and uses increasingly transgressive sex for a high of its own: she deflowers runaway teenage boys ("supping on their energy like an insatiable bloodsucker whose belly would never fill"), dabbles with a cannibal (whose room smells like "barbecue and old leather"), and turns tricks with a lesbian mother trying to put her girlfriend through law school. Of johns and men in general, she writes that they all "get milked." She describes the beginnings of her performance work as "a bigger hustle" that she undertakes because it "took up too much time servicing just one john at a time." Beyond the book's chronicling of Lunch's desires, it serves an overarching, exhibitionist desire to perform, and it brings a decrepit, vanished New York to life. Lunch's book is explicit, and it sometimes matches a rawness of experience with a purpleness of prose, but it recreates its time and place with vivid authenticity.
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Review
"Paradoxia reveals that Lunch is at her best when she’s at her worst . . . and gives voice to her sometimes scary, frequently funny, always canny, never sentimental siren song."
― Barbara Kruger, ArtForum
"Hubert Selby, Jr. famously said that he grew up feeling like a scream without a mouth. Lydia Lunch, one of his most celebrated―and most uncompromising―literary progeny, delivered scream, mouth, teeth, blood, hair, sperm, knife, and adrenaline in her purgatorial masterpiece Paradoxia."
― Jerry Stahl, from the introduction
About the Author
LYDIA LUNCH was the primary instigator of the No Wave Movement, and the focal point of the Cinema of Transgression. A musician, writer, and photographer, she exposes the dark underbelly of passion confronting the lusty demons whose struggle for power and control forever stalk the periphery of our collective obsessions. She is the author of Paradoxia and Will Work For Drugs.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
From Chapter 1: "I'd stalk bars, clubs, bookstores, public parks and the Emergency Room. Seeking in lost men a place to lose myself. Searching for a pocket of weakness. Looking for the 'sweet spot', a small tear in the psychic fabric to feast upon. To hide inside. A place to disappear in, manifesting myself in a multiplicity of personalities which all shared the same goal. To trick the next john into relinquishing his moral, financial, spiritual or physical guard, so that no matter what the outcome, I won. I got what I wanted. Whether it was money, conversation, drama - or sex."
