Ends of Our Tethers: 13 Sorry Stories by Alasdair Gray Book

You can read my entire discussion here.

Review snippet: Tilda is not a woman given to subterfuge. She does not manipulate and she does not really fight with him. But as he tries to force her into a role he thinks more appropriate - like making her shop for clothes she does not want or care about - he comes to understand that her passivity is not a ploy. He realizes the woman who fucks with ease is really as disengaged from sex as she is from shopping, though he doesn't have to threaten to throw her out to make her acquiesce to sex. One gets the feeling that anything she does not have to leave the house to do she is fine enough just enduring in her disembodied sort of way.

He slowly begins to understand her because her constant nearness forces him to. She hates being apart from him, even when he takes a daily walk. Their days took on a near-boring sameness for him, but not for her. She sat at the floor and watched him work, ate the meals he cooked and did little else.

I asked if she would like a television set? A Walkman radio? Magazines? She said, "A properly furnished mind cunt is its own feast cunt and does not need such expensive and foolish extravagances."

God, I loved Tilda completely after reading that sentence. The narrator tells us she stops using the word "cunt" so much as their time together went on, but he still had a hard time knowing what was going on in her properly furnished mind.