Chapter 4: How to Spot a Narcissist

Before it's too late

Bear with me as the following is all quite fresh. I wrote a version of it in 2022, but have lost it somewhere amongst all the devices that I had to get rid of during the two months + two years of intimidation, hacking and surveillance. I've lost two good phones, a laptop and some Bluetooth headphones to that.

It's likely it actually won't be Chapter 4, but it will be included somewhere in the book.

I wrote a version of it on X the platform formerly known as Twitter as that's where I generally write my first drafts. There or Instagram.

The description of the book that I send to agents hasn't changed much since 2022, except I added the word 'sex'.

Vignettes of a chaotic life, that straddles two worlds; the anti-imperialist black and browns and the socialist white left.

This is a true story from the point of view of a reluctant investigative journalist and former foreign correspondent about class, sex, danger, and mental health.

At the centre of this unconventional memoir is a celebration of the black, white and brown working classes. The unsung heroes and the dirtbags.

I think it's important as a woman and especially as a black woman who moves between white, black and brown spaces and men to talk about sex.

Many if not most people in the West don't see value or beauty in black women. There was even an academic study by an evolutionary psychologist at the London School of Economics around fifteen years ago saying we were objectively less attractive than all other races and that white women were most attractive because of the fairness of their skin and pink of their lips.

It came out the same year the Swedish Culture minister, Lena Adelsohn Liljeroth cut into a black woman cake and laughed and laughed and laughed as she sliced.

And not long before Dasha Zhukova the partner of Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich sat on a black woman 'mannequin' dressed in fetish gear. (She apologised after the blacklash)

But many of us have learned or had to learn our worth and our beauty, and that it doesnt lie within the gaze of any white person, gatekeeper or man.