Summary

In Chapter 3 — “Three: the women and men who came and went” (77) — Evaristo recounts how her romantic relationships have affected her creative life.

When she was a teenager, she liked boys, though she observes that her desire for a boyfriend was partly the result of cultural conditioning. Evaristo spent most of her 20s in relationships with women, but lived as heterosexual again in her 30s. Her first major love affair was with a Dutch woman nine years older than her, whom she refers to as eX. Having both set up their own theater companies, in London and Amsterdam, they met at a women’s theater festival. Between visits to each other’s cities, they wrote letters to each other. Evaristo notes that eX’s ability to be more vulnerable than her was partly due to racial differences...