I finally stopped letting Fitzgerald intimidate me…

She finds a copy of ‘Tender is the Night’ in a second-hand bookstore a few weeks after they end it for good. It makes her cry all over again. It was his favourite, and even though she has bad school memories of ‘The Great Gatsby,’ she’d read it anyway. More than the book itself, she likes the trivia around it – the way it was rewritten after Fitzgerald’s death to make it more acceptable, more palatable. She sympathises with that – the inability to tell the exact truth about something because nobody else quite *gets* it. From the very start the best bits were a series of occasional moments that she revisited time and time again in her head – sucking his cock in a dark alleyway after their first date; the flowers he bought her two weeks in; the butt plug he gave her after six.

You couldn’t share those moments with other people – they always wanted the chronology, the forward momentum (not to mention that the words ‘butt plug’ made them wince.) They wanted a proposal, marriage, babies – something they could relate to their own experience. Theirs wasn’t a story you could sell, and almost everyone was glad when he left her. But months later she still revisited those memories – dipping in at will. Treating them more like poetry than a novel.