'I fell in love for the first time when i was fourteen. Not a mild love. Not the sort of minor skirmish with passion that can be dismissed as merely a crush. This wasn't the pop-star-poster frenzy of pubescent fantasy. This was serious: inescapable, life-shuddering, palm-itching, shameful, passionate, hateful, total desire; Eros and Thanatos copulating in my imagination long before I even had words to articulate such thoughts. This was a passion that would last.' (Author's abstract)