Confessions of Lilith
An original monologue performed at London Fashion week for the Completedworks show
When I lived in Iowa City, I owned an old Remington typewriter. It was entirely impractical— keys that always stuck to the page and ink that was too dry— but still, on rare occasions I’d take it out of its beautiful old box and stare at the blank page.
Late one night, alone in my attic studio apartment, I wrote:
Lilith is a Garamond girl.
A character emerged. One that made me laugh. The voice and tone was very different than the style I was immersed in for the novel, stranger, more free, and I think this deterred me or made me feel like I was wading out of my comfort zone. I put it away and didn’t return to her again— didn’t even think of her again, really.
Ten years later, Anna Jewsbury, the brilliant artistic director of Completedworks asked me if I’d write a monologue for their FW24 show in London. I’ve long been a fan of their gorgeous jewelry— each piece designed like a sculpture, with edge and personality, whimsy and timeless beauty.
I sat with the idea. I genuinely love the challenge of assignments like this, I think of them as opportunities to take my writing into new territory, a place I wouldn’t think to go without the prompt or constraint. I looked through the upcoming collection and their past catalogue for inspiration. At some point, I remembered Lilith. The original paper I’d typed on was lost, but her energy and that first sentence, ‘Lilith is a Garamond girl’— was clear in my memory.
Except this time, there was also an unnamed narrator who who was imagining Lilith, and for whom Lilith was somewhere between an imaginary friend and an alter ego. It’s strange to me that Lilith lurked in my subconscious for a decade, and it was this assignment that activated her. That time had to pass for me to find the right form for her, and become the kind of writer who gave myself permission to play.
The monologue is titled, CONFESSIONS OF LILITH, and it was recently performed by Joanna Lumley at the FW24 Completedworks show in London. A gorgeous set was created, and I was amazed when I first saw the photos: stacks of magazines, burnt toast on small plates— all referenced in the piece.
When you’re a writer, the world of your work exists entirely in your imagination and on the page. It was a disorienting dream come true for it to take shape in the real world in the form of carefully curated set design, and for it to be voiced and embodied front of a live audience.
Published below is the entire monologue, CONFESSIONS OF LILITH. I hope you have as much fun reading it as I did writing it— its not often that I use the word ‘fun’ for the process of writing, but this one really did make me smile.
xx
Fatima Farheen
CONFESSIONS OF LILITH
I let my toast burn on purpose.
I like the sound a butter knife makes when scraping off the burn.
Before I’ve taken my first bite of breakfast, I like throwing bits away.
True or false: smelling burnt toast where there is none could be a sign of stroke.
When I am alone, I assume a mask. The mask is named Lilith.
Lilith is a Garamond girl.
She parts her hair down the middle.
She never listens to her voicemails.
The only bags she wears are bowed.
She wouldn’t be caught dead in polka dot.
Unless the dot is red.
A confession: I cheated on my drivers test.
And once I crashed my car and my mother’s car. At the same time. (I reversed into hers, 15mph. We were in a fight at the time.)
Another time, the snow melted, and I realized I’d parked on the sidewalk itself.
Lilith doesn’t drive. She lives exclusively in cities where she can lift her right hand and say, “Taxi!”
Like magic, the taxi comes.
If it’s a day when she’s reading a particularly good book, or feeling queasy— usually the first day of every new month— (Lilith won’t call this anxiety about the passage of time, but we all know what it is)— she’ll take the underground.
Once she missed her stop 3x in a row.
Rode to Holborn, then back to Bond Street, then too far to Oxford Circus, until finally to Tottenham Court Road.
The book was that good.
Another confession: I don’t read books. Only compulsively buy them in hardcover.
Let them pile up guiltily by my bedside table until, one day, I give up, and take my stack to my shelf to organize them by theme:
FOOD WRITING. WRITER’S DIARIES. THE TROUBLES. WITCHES, ETC. THE INCOMPLETE WORKS OF SUSAN SONTAG.
Until the next dinner party when someone stares up at it with a glass of champagne bubbling and says Oh, Gosh yes, the diaries of Sontag.
And I nod, gosh, yes.
Instead, I’m a magazine junkie. I wish I lived next to a newsstand.
No: I wish I owned one.
On days where I don’t know what to do I walk thirteen minutes to the closest newsagents.
Ali behind the counter knew I’d left my boyfriend before my closest friends. I’m in the mood for poems, I’ll say, or carpets, do you have anything on carpets?
Here, Ali says, The Latest HALI.
A perfect day, really, is the very day I have in abundance, with monotonous frequency.
Lilith does not have mundane days. Alone with herself doing household chores, she often plays games aloud. For example: Talk Show During Sweater Folding. Moss green sweater held up, Lilith says aloud in her American TV voice, “Many people wonder if they should fold or hang their sweaters. If you’re wondering which way to go, ask yourself— how much did I pay for this sweater? How often do I wear it? And most importantly: how prone is this material to losing structure from stretched shoulders?