Hey, Baby, Let’s Go for a Ride

So, the risks I took, women take, when traveling alone. In my previous post, I described shacking up with two strange men on my first night in Bangkok. A day or so later, I got in touch with my friend Jillana, who was living there, and I crashed at her apartment and let her show me around. That made the transition to the foreign…

Lucky? And/or smart? Solo Women and Safety

So I’ve been thinking about the “white chicks shouldn’t” theme for awhile, now, and about how, consciously or unconsciously, most women have a strategy for dealing with the threat of sexual violence. I’m at a stage in my life where I rarely traverse the nighttime streets alone, but I do walk home from work on dark winter evenings, and sometimes the adrenaline surge I…

Strip Bars, Sex Workers, Here and Then and There

My novel CURRENCY is about a Thai man and American woman who have a hard time unraveling their genuine connection from sticky assumptions about money, gender, sex, and nationality. The book is set in Thailand, where the sex industry informs the way foreign and local men and women look at each other, but the protagonist is affected, too, by her dating experiences in the…

Acknowledging

I just sent the copyedited manuscript of CURRENCY to Gina, my editor. The next time I see the novel, it will be in galleys, manuscript no more. It’s been twelve years since I workshopped the experiment in voice that became the first chapter of the novel. I was 28 years old then, and I smoked cigarettes blithely in the apartment where Mark and I…