Diary of an Emotional Idiot: A Novel

Hello, my name is Zoe and this is my book. It is a document of Emotional Idiocy told in two parts. There is the "then" part, which explains how I got here, and there is the "now" part, which documents what I am doing here. At the moment, I am sitting at my desk naked but for some men's boxer shorts and many silver bracelets. I like to see myself in men's underwear. I like to see men in men's underwear. Men in women's underwear is also acceptable. Other women in men's underwear doesn't do so much for me. However, if someone were to bring a tribe of women clad only in men's underwear to my house, I might find it slightly exciting. I might not kick them out of my house. My house is not a bad house. It is a small hovel in a tenement building on East Sixth Street in New York City. I live there with few furnishings, many books, and a cat named Wimpy given to me by Jim, a talented but ornery painter I used to sleep with. Wimpy weighs twenty-two pounds and has a psychological disorder: If I leave him alone too long, he becomes convinced that he has fleas and scratches himself raw. This I am telling you because it is an apt metaphor for how I feel in my skin right now. I am digging at my hide, rubbing it raw because I've been rubbed raw by love gone wrong. Yes. This is another tale of love gone wrong. This is me turned idiot in the face of human interaction.