Every book I’ve ever written begins and ends with Lesley Ann Downey. Every single one. Every thing I’ve fucked has been a stab at the idea of her somehow in my pathetically empty hands. Not as flesh and hair and precisely examined childhood but as simple, personally degrading pornography. It’s the only way I know her. It’s the only way I know of her. Almost all of it in badly reproduced black and white. I have more color photos of her mother than I do of her. It’s nothing to say something has value as pornography. The universal possibilities are rudimentary. I’m not really working backwards, I’m trying for more. I’m getting better at it and I’m finding her little worth increases constantly. How ugly it would be to say my life changed inexorably after seeing the photos of her darling little smiling face juxtaposed to the details of her torture and murder and burial. And how thin my excuses and denial would sound… I don’t want to talk about what was. About my first time fucking some willing same-aged thing or the first time I saw a photo of a naked child being sweetly molested. I’m not interested in trawling backwards so that you can point out where I’ve been locked all these years… It must seem like I’m trying to explain myself. It must seem like I’m desperate enough to finger hypocrisies and social inconsistencies. I’m bored with remembering my low-impact arrest. Much more then you are. I know what Andrea Dworkin sounds like when she talks about her rape in every fucking book. I am not bored with Lesley Ann Downey’s very careful positioning on the bed of some stranger’s shitty dilapidated house.
Extract from Peter Sotos, Selfish, Little: The Annotated Lesley Ann Downey
Peter Sotos Wikipedia page
Discussion at Barbelith Underground
Peter Sotos Day on Dennis Cooper's blog
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