"When I feel like indulging my death drive, I make eye contact with strange men on the street. On Bleecker they let me look. On 110 W and 111th they do more than that. The trick is to orchestrate their attention without effort. The trick is not to care where that attention strikes. Most of them are always already looking for me anyway: short skirt and shagged hair. A woman with a smile but without a name. The perfect kind of dame. I once read an interview with a painter who said, by going public with my body I deprivatized it. Deprivatizing my body grants me the capital I crave. The faintest flip of my skirt guarantees such a score. One could gamble on such certainty, and I do. Men are easy, and I am ruthless. I’ll confess, I am often this way."
In Klute, Bree Daniels became one of the most memorable voices in film noir. In Bree: An Autobiography, Hannah Bonner has become one of the most memorable voices in whatever genre this book has invented. A deft hybrid of film theory, fiction, memoir, and persona poetry, which stylishly combines Bree’s brio with Bonner’s own, the book delivers a virtuosic performance of ventriloquism and insight, projecting the reader deep inside the mind inside the screen. The result is more than a brilliant debut: it’s an instant classic of cinema fiction and creative criticism, to be shelved alongside works like Gabriel Blackwell’s Madeleine E. and Tisa Bryant’s Unexplained Presence.
– Bennett Sims, author of Other Minds and Other Stories
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