Dark Desires is the author's autobiographical fantasia on the ten years she spent living in New York City. Valenzuela has called this book her "apocryphal autobiography."
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"Here I am," writes Luisa Valenzuela, "submerged in a sea of notebooks . . ." Dark Desires is the author's autobiographical fantasia on the ten years she spent living in New York City. Valenzuela has called this book her "apocryphal autobiography," and in it she says very little about her work as a writer, about the city itself, or even about literature. Instead, Dark Desires is a dialogue between the sometimes harmonious, sometimes contradictory worlds of writing and human interaction: for Valenzuela, writing, like love, is an attempt to reach out to another person, to make some sort of connection possible. Here, Valenzuela confronts her own “dark desires”: her need for sexual fulfillment and human tenderness, her indecisiveness about who or what she truly wants, and, overall, the compulsion to keep a written record of all her triumphs and disasters, encounters and obsessions.