Page "Barbara Gowdy" Paragraph 3

The narrator and main character of the title short story of her 1992 collection, We So Seldom Look On Love, for instance, is an assistant embalmer at a funeral home who makes love to the bodies of attractive young men before they are buried.

The story was the inspiration for the 1996 Canadian independent film Kissed, directed by Lynne Stopkewich and starring Molly Parker.

The story's name is taken from a line in the Frank O ' Hara's poem " Ode to Necrophilia ", and was inspired by a newspaper article Gowdy read about a young California woman who hijacked a hearse on its way to a funeral, took the corpse of the young man inside the coffin to a motel room and had sex with it for several days before being caught by the police.

The entire story collection deals with outsiders trying to find their place in the world and doing whatever they have to do achieve this end.

" The Two-Headed Man ," for instance, features a man who removes his conjoined head and, therefore, either commits murder or suicide.

A third story, " 93 Million Miles Away " involves a woman who, in a desperate need to be seen and known, exposes herself through the window of her apartment to the doctor in an apartment across the lane.

This story was made into the film Arousal.