Paradoxia: A Predator's Diary

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.