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She has a quick, dirty mind, yet somehow or other she seems oddly naïve and very sweet. As soon as she turned 18, she had herself sterilized. She wants to stay in the hospital because she hopes her divorced parents will accidentally visit at the same time and magically recognize they still love each other. The novel's basic premise is that Helen has had sex, feels great about that, and is generally at home and easy with human fluids in a way that the rest of us are not.
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I wanted to find my own style – and that involved annoying a lot of people at first. While I couldn’t stand literature at school, I was very much into drama and made sure that I always got the best roles in my school plays. I could never remember the right facts for my exams, but I always knew my lines for the school play.
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Already troubled by a complicated family history, Kiehl has been left a "wounded animal" by the accident. She is suicidal yet terrified of death, and clings to sanity for the sake of her husband and seven-year-old daughter with the help of thrice-weekly sessions with Frau Drescher, her therapist. Roche certainly knows how to write a memorable opening scene.
Early life
But people often assume it was something I did as a sort of glamorous part-time job to support my writing career – that’s a very German approach, perhaps. I used to read a lot in my early teens, even some of the classics, but it was all ruined for me by those German classes in which we had to take writing apart. And now that I’m a mother – my child was born five years ago – it’s just very difficult to find the time for reading. The only book I have read recently is the The Great Gatsby and even that took me almost three years. Roche, 30, was born in High Wycombe, but moved with her British parents to Germany as a young child, and has been a national celebrity there since her teens, presenting music and culture shows.
To bodily go ...
Roche has a five-year-old daughter, and so I ask if she hopes she will grow up to share Helen's relationship with her own body. Her father, like Helen's, was an engineer - he built factories for Mars in Germany - and her parents divorced when she was five. "Like all children of divorce," her poignant prologue reads, "I want to see my parents back together." She made them both promise not to read the book, and has since wondered whether subconsciously it was the protagonist's preoccupation with divorce she wanted to protect them from. Let’s face it; who of us hasn’t checked the tissue after a sneeze, peered into the toilet bowl, picked at a scab to see what was underneath?
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Surrounded by surgical instruments and humming X-ray machines, she reflects in ever more uncomfortable detail on the eccentric wonders of the female body. It’s an explicit novel, often shockingly so, but also a surprisingly accomplished literary work, which evokes the voice of J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, the perversion of J.G. Ballard’s Crash and the feminist agenda of Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch.
Helen entertains herself by remembering varied sex acts, obsessing over bodily fluids and playing pranks on the hospital workers. I’m afraid I don’t think England is any better than America in that respect. In terms of body-culture, England is always quick to follow the latest trends in the States. And it always amuses me how Americans and English people will to this day continue to make jokes about German women having hairy armpits. These days, German women shave themselves too, you know. And don’t worry, I don’t think just because they read my book they will suddenly stop doing so.
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Feuchtgebiete, which translates as Wetlands, or Moist Patches, is the debut novel from Charlotte Roche. As it opens, we find 18-year-old narrator Helen Memel in hospital, after an accident shaving her intimate parts. The remainder of the book plays out entirely on the proctology ward where, in between ruminating on her haemorrhoids and sexual proclivities, Helen asks her male nurse to photograph her wound, tries to seduce him, and hides under her bed to masturbate. She has an insatiable, childlike curiosity about the sight and smell and taste of bodies, especially her own. Hygiene, she reflects, "is not a major concern of mine".
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"At the moment I just feel the pressure so strongly, and I don't understand why it's there. So I want to talk about it." At public readings women often tell her they daren't have sex with their husbands if they have not shaved their legs for one day. Roche's mother was a feminist, the sort of mum who talked about contraception and allowed her daughter to have sex at home from an early age. No one has ever brought it up in an interview, either. When I started out as a presenter, I wanted to do television in a way in which no one has ever done television before.
Her debut novel, Wetlands, which was published in her native Germany in 2008 and went on to become a worldwide bestseller, began with an 11-page description of the protagonist accidentally slicing into her haemorrhoids while shaving. Wrecked starts with a similarly detailed account of oral sex, which could well be described as "blow-by-blow". But I suspect such depths did not occur to Roche, who insists that “Wetlands” is a celebration of the female body. She does seem to have hitched a ride on the zeitgeist — the book is being translated into 27 languages.
We’re obsessed with cleanliness, with getting rid of our natural excretions and our body hair. So I wanted to write about the ugly parts of the human body. In order to tell that story, I created a heroine that has a totally creative attitude towards her body – someone who has never even heard that women are supposedly smelly between their legs. Eventually she began shaving again, just "to get rid of the issue", and still does.
Feuchtgebiete, which translates roughly as ‘wetlands’ or ‘moist patches’, was published by Cologne’s Dumont Verlag earlier this year. It is narrated by eighteen-year-old Helen Memel, an outspoken teenager whose childlike stubbornness is paired with a premature sense of sexual confidence. After a failed attempt to shave her intimate parts, Helen ends up in the Department of Internal Medicine at the Maria Hilf Hospital. She doesn’t leave the ward for the rest of the novel.
Charlotte Roche has written an uncomfortable, blunt treatise on a young woman’s remarkable exploration of her body and its juices. It is a slimy swim, but one worth taking. First, you have to dive into that filthy concoction. The 18-year-old narrator, Helen Memel, is in the hospital recuperating from an operation to remove an anal lesion. We get the play-by-play for her poor little posterior, both the events leading up to the lesion and every moment after the operation including the male nurse agreeing to take digital photos of the result and the doctor bringing in a plastic baggy of the detritus he removed.
When she uses public toilets, she likes to rub her vagina around the lavatory seat, and she has experimented with "long periods of not washing my pussy", to investigate its erotic impact - dabbing her own personal pubic perfume behind her earlobes. "It works wonders from the moment you greet someone with a kiss on each cheek." There is a lot of talk about this novel being a manifesto on the female body and sexuality, an updated and 21st century “Fear of Flying.” Helen is open and adventurous and willing to explore any new avenue -- so to speak -- and she revels in her desire and need for gratification. Certainly, she has no fear of discussing her body and asking for what she wants. There is nothing coy or cute about her, not with the men and women she hooks up with, or the doctors and nurses she deals with during her hospital stay.
While she is stuck in bed, unable to leave until she has a bowel movement, Helen keeps herself occupied reminiscing about her exploits. Kiehl believes that in their preoccupation with receiving sexual pleasure, the older generation of feminists forgot that good sex is all about reciprocity. As a good wife and mother, she indulges her husband's desires, even accompanying him to brothels. The child of a broken marriage, she is determined that her own marriage will "last forever".
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