My Body Would be the Kindest of Strangers

Sam D'Allesandro once wrote, "I like living with the danger of what you know about me," and the candidness on display in Fiona Helmsley's My Body Would be the Kindest of Strangers takes an incredible amount of guts. Beginning with an epigram from Anne Sexton's With Mercy for the Greedy and ending with an essay on the virtues of Courtney Love, in-between, her stories and essays breathe new life into the idea that the things that we are ashamed of often make for the best stories.Badly wounding her boyfriend in a fight over money for drugs, Helmsley leaves her beloved bloody, and the responsibility of getting him to the hospital on someone else. After plotting with a friend how to best get money for drugs, their decision to charge their friends for sex leads to devastating results.Including essays on art and persona, the rejection of the word "victim," and an imagined meeting between Joan Vollmer Burroughs and Patti Smith at the Chelsea Hotel, Fiona Helmsley's My Body Would be the Kindest of Strangers presents and gritty and moving portrait of life on the fringes at the turn of the millennium.… (more)