A rather sexy, booze-laden, drug-fueled letter from Jennifer Grimshaw in 1982 with some revisions and responses by the biographer, (me) in 2025.
This is a new way of writing between the lines.
Jennifer Grimshaw was one of the many aliases of my late husband Nicholas Grimshaw, and his first. Jennifer wrote this letter below to our friend
in 1982, but it took me almost a year to open the envelope and read it.I knew that Nina and Jennifer met in the 1970’s in Boston, and were on & off lovers, and then friends for the rest of their lives. I knew Nina took Jennifer to get chest surgery when she was transitioning from Jennifer into Nicholas. Nina was there with me in the hospital in 2020, when Nick was dying of cancer, but I don’t think he was aware of any of us at your bedside by then. Nina drove me back home to East Hampton the day Nick died.
These letters Nina gave me are startling because of how vividly Nick speaks of what it was like to live in the East Village in the 1980s, and because we lived only two blocks apart. Nick speaks about his writing too, which just tugs at my heart. I know that just a few years after this letter he threw out all of it, the book he had been working on for his entire adult life up until then.
So, here goes. This is 2025 talking to 1982. A rather sexy, booze-laden, drug-fueled letter from Jennifer Grimshaw in 1982 with some revisions and responses by the biographer, (me) in 2025. A new way of writing between the lines.
Letter - Tues. 1/5/1982
Jennifer:
“Nina. I pick you. Tonight I want to write a letter. Here it is… It is of all times the most exciting time for me now. I am living in New York, as you know, although I am writing to you from East Hampton. In five weeks in New York, I’ll tell you what I’ve done. That I remember… I moved from East Hampton to Second Street. On each of the four corners of my home intersection several men actively sell works, heroin, cocaine and speed (this much I know because they yell it out; what else they sell I don’t know)…
I can read my book now. I can actually read and comprehend what is written there, and also what is not written. I can take what I’ve written and make it plain. I want it to be as plain as a piece of Shaker furniture, and to be everything else in addition to plain that a piece of Shaker furniture is, as a work.”
(Kara: Well, that is amazing. It sounds incredibly naive and profound at the same time, like a young woman’s mad dream. It is so like you. Throughout your life you wanted to simplify and beautify, quietly.)
Jennifer:
“This hashish I am smoking does not seem to get me any higher, no matter how much I smoke… I spend the majority of evenings at The Bar; my neighborhood bar, predominantly gay male, then lesbian, then straight male, then straight female. the main attraction of this bar for me is: pool table, lesbians, convenience. I call it Fran’s and my bedroom because we spend most of our time sublimating our sexual desire by playing pool there. We have no place to sleep together except occasionally…
(Kara: So, in all of the world, you and I are living basically within two blocks of each other? I am on 4th street between Avenues A. and B. by 1982, and you are on Second Street. Two or three blocks! How many times did we pass each other on the street or sit tables away in one of our local restaurants or bars? I just can’t picture where this bar was, no matter how many times I scan my visual memory.)
Jennifer:
“I’ve let my fingernails grow long since I am not working out. (Try gripping an 85 pound weight with a fistful of fingernails!) I long (”long” again!) to start working out. It has been since July that I haven’t lifted weights. By now I have little to show for my year’s work. It is some comfort to know that getting muscle tone and size back is easier than first creating it. How much easier I don’t know. I will have it back, I often promise myself. I so miss the sensation of muscular stress, the hardness of my body, and my pleasure in touching it. More body-imagery in my thought then, more physical power fantasies. More spitting and straining - I like it!”
(Kara: Jesus Christ you are explicit. What gives you the right to speak to our friend, and your former lover Nina in this provocative way? It seems like you are taunting and tempting, which I don’t think is fair, since you hope and question whether or not she is in love with you - in print in your letters to her! )
Jennifer:
“But New York. I’ve taken speed for the first time (and second and third), and cocaine once. There’s plenty of pot around, and of course I drink. I’ve also taken up cigarettes gradually as a result of being around them. (Fran smokes. She even smokes my brand.)”
(Kara: That’s very funny.)
Jennifer:
“I’ve fallen in love. I’ve done that a lot, you’ve heard that. I’ve not told about it as many times as I have told about it, too. So there’ve been a few times. Love is more precious than anything because it makes life possible… Franny has fallen in love with me back. She’s told me two dozen times at least. I continue to be in love with her. We fight what seems to us both to be a great deal. Actually it is I who fight and Fran who shields herself from assaults (verbal)… Through all my anger, tears, accusations, refusal to believe wholeheartedly that she loved me, and after the times I hung up the ‘phone on her, walked out on her and told her “Fuck you!” in just the last five weeks; through all that, her love for me has grown. And because that was what happened with her, I was free to address myself to understanding what was happening with me… I hope someday that our positions, hers and mine, in this business of learning, will be reversed…
It has been important for Fran to learn my weakness, my dependency upon her, how deeply and how easily I am crushed by any real or imagined rejection. How proud I am and how easily my pride is hurt. That she can make me abandon my pride by walking out the door. That she can walk out the door. I must ask Fran if she knew I would run after her… So Fran has got a power over me. Now she understands that, and that’s wonderful for her.
Fran hasn’t got erotic confidence in herself. I mean she doesn’t know herself as a lover. This is what I give. I am The lover’s lover. What do you think I mean by that? What Jane would not allow, Frances will. I can have sex with other people, I can grease back my hair, wear a black leather jacket and shoot pool. And I can put my face up and close my eyes and have a dozen soft little kisses on the mouth and never do a thing.”
(Kara: Ok, so I am a bit hurt. I thought I was the magical one that you could allow to come forward and kiss you. I thought I was the one who didn’t make you flinch when I advanced. But it wasn’t that kind of advance on that early day of you and I. And I said - No, no, not like that - and I kissed you right between your eyes. Softly. I thought I was the only one you would let do that. I guess I forgive you.)
Jennifer:
“Fran’s much bigger than I am and I love that. The smell of the sweat of my lover arouses me at any time. I am aware of it. I have a sexual fantasy involving Fran in which she is very dominating and also very aroused. So far this has not happened except… There was something like it the last time: I said I wanted more and in response to that she made me come twice more without respite. It’s good for a start on that fantasy. Despite our fighting and also because of it, Fran and I are very happy about what we are being, doing.? What do you say?”
(Kara: “without respite”? Why does it matter what Nina thinks by the way? Without respite?! I think literariness has got you by the labia here.)
Jennifer:
“On New Year’s Eve Fran and I were on the dire outs. At about 5:00 I decided, Fuck it, I’ll score for some speed at The Bar and see if I can have myself some kind of good time without Fran. I had worked all day (writing work) and I got dressed up and for the 1st time in about two months I greased up my hair. I put on a little eyeliner and lipstick, a black sweater and black leather jacket, and the funny red mittens that somebody left in Fran’s cab, and went out… Well, I got the speed and I got something else too. When I walked into the place who was there but Ann? One of the falling in loves I didn’t mention to you. We had never exchanged a word. Oh, maybe a word. We had only stared, unsmiling and fascinated, at each other nine or ten months ago in the same bar over the same pool table…
We spent the evening together. We were continually and unrelievedly delighted by each other. I want to get to know this woman, and to be as close to her as it is natural, between us, to be. I only thank God it is not Fran who is thinking these thoughts (to my knowledge). She knows I have met “someone else” and she knows whom I mean… Nina! What in heaven’s name is this? I know not what to make of it: what to cut it up and reconstruct it as? What to presume its effects will be?”
(Kara: I am surprised by how analytical you are about relationships and love. Even more, by how distant you are. As if you are not the one really there. And if you are not the one really there, then who is doing al the huffing and shouting and demanding and moping and cheating? My guess is that it is the pot and speed and cocaine and alcohol. Yes. You poor dear. All of that to make you feel something.)
Jennifer:
“New York - I lost five pounds or so from being in love and distressed about it. I worked at Macy’s all month, and then some. I didn’t see television ever, except “Holiday Inn” on Christmas Eve. I had a bath only about once every three or four days. I often slept with another person out of necessity, because we had too few beds. I never cooked except for a weekly pot of soup, the soup I had for dinner every night, except when I ate nothing… Nina, about this book I write. It comes to my attention that it is about love as I have known it and I’ve never read anything like it. The only believable and thorough description of love, of specifically the sexual… ”
(Kara: I cried when I read this. Oh, my dear. This manuscript! What it must have been, even if only fragments on bits of napkins. I cried when I read this because I know that later, after you have given your mother a possible first draft, or first chapters, and she did not give you anything to make you want to go on living, that you told her casually in one of your letters that you had decided to throw out everything you had written up to that point! Everything you carried in an old cardboard suitcase - or am I making that part up? You just decided you were tired of dying trying. I will hate her forever for that.)
Jennifer:
“(No I take it back: the only believable and thorough description of erotic love which I have ever read is ‘Lolita.’ For that reason it is the most admired book)…
I imagine, presume, that I will make plenty of money on my book. My most satisfying imaginings, though, are of certain people’s reading and having read what I have to say. Certain people to whom I want to display my courage and intelligence, and by whom I want to be respected as a truthful writer. I used to dread the thought of publishing, and the reason was that my story was “too private;” I didn’t want to be so intimately known by strangers. I am not afraid of that anymore. I respect myself for what I am doing, and for what I have already done in the writing of this book. I no longer feel ambivalent toward telling the truth.”
(Kara: So, here you are in all your contradictory brilliance. Of course, you are going to be published, famous, and rich! I remember the 1980’s, when writers still made a living from books, barely. Nicholas, you managed to capture Jennifer and send her through time, a Jennifer on a night when you had just the right amount of sincerity, and hope. Just the right amount of humility and hubris and bravery to say out loud what you wanted. Just the right amount of clear-eyed dreaming that it takes to respect the work of art you are endeavoring to make! I am so glad you left this evidence for us, of an alternative route that might have been, that was in your bandwidth, if only other chaos hadn’t gotten in your path.)
Jennifer:
“So there’s my letter,
(Signed) Jennifer Grimshaw”