We've got a great thread going about lesbian films people have enjoyed, but as far as I know, we don't have one about lesbian literature (novels, poetry etc). I know there is a ton of terrific fanfic out there, but let's keep this to published writing (if someone else wants to start a general fanfic reccomendation thread, go for it!).

To start things off, of course I'll mention Sarah Waters:
Tipping the Velvet
Fingersmith
The Night Watch
(I didn't enjoy Affinity, her second novel, but it does have a women in prison theme, so it could be interesting to folks on this board)
The thing I love about Sarah Waters is that she is such a good storyteller--her novels are all real page-turners--and yet she doesn't sacrifice literary quality (ie character and thematic development, enjoyable use of language etc).

Now, for some more obscure lesbian novels which I found to be incredibly well-written:

Some Girls by Kristin McCloy
This book was reccomended to me by someone on this board, and it is incredible. Great language, dynamic and interesting characters, and a lovely exploration of a "straight" woman realizing she is not so straight. Plus it takes place in NYC, so there's a lot of local color for New Yorkers to enjoy.

The Sopranos by Alan Warner
This novel is more of an ensemble piece, so only one of the many intertwined plotlines could be termed lesbian, but it is about friendships between women (or, girls in this case, since they are all about 17), and is just brilliantly written. Slightly surreal in writing style. Takes place in Scotland, when a group of teenagers travel from a tiny coastal town to Edinburgh for a choral competition.

The Sea of Light by Jenifer Levin
I love this novel. It's about lesbian swimmers. But it's much better than your typical sports novel, and it's much better than your typical lesbian novel. The narrative voice shifts from character to character, and in the end it's really about how we heal from trauma.

The Law of Return by Alice Bloch
OK, here I am getting really obscure, but in the days before Sarah Waters, you had to really search for decently-written lesbian fiction, and this novel is one of the ones I found. It's about an American Jewish woman who moves to Israel and falls in love. But it's really about identity etc. Of course it's out of print, but you can order used copies online.

OK, that's enough to get us started. Everyone else jump in with your favorite lesbian novels!

Fingersmith! Hands down, that is the best i've read.


I love it because it is a lovestory and a thriller. Most times you'll read a thriller and all of a sudden the two main characters get together. Or you'll read a novels and nothing really happens. This book has both and that is what makes a great book for me.

I'm happy to come out as the one who recommended Some Girls to Abzug, the writing's gorgeous. The irony, or so it seems to me, is that the author's likely straight; given how much lesbian pulp is published with its canned, predictable developments, I find it very interesting (and rather curious) that to get something fresh--the book's shamelessly romantic w/o being sentimental, the prose is incredibly clean & crisp--you have to find a straight writer. Go figure. (Sadly, Some Girls is out of print, so you'd have to hunt it down online or luck out & find it at a used bookstore.)

Classics, if you're new to lesbian literature, include the obvious: Rubyfruit (which I never cared for but is kind of required reading); Desert of the Heart, by Jane Rule, which is to my mind one of the best, most complex & literary books abt lesbian characters from the last century (it has nothing in common with the movie--thankfully, imo), & Patience & Sarah (Isabelle Miller), a nice historical piece. Sorry, but Oranges left me cold.

I read a lot of Y/A (young adult) lesbian/gay fiction (well, a lot of what's out there, which isn't much): most is pretty mediocre, but Empress of the World, by Sarah Ryan, is very tight, very well-written & characterized, & up front without being melodramatic about presenting the trials around sexuality of its young protagonists. She's finally got a sequel due out spring of next year, which I'm looking forward to. I also really enjoyed Sugar Rush (the novel): I understand the author's fairly unlikeable & seems given to mouthy self-promotion; fortunely I knew nothing of her when I read it, so had no biases, & though the ending's a bit OTT, think the writing & characterizations are both believable & consistent. It's also genuinely witty, although some of the slang may be a challenge for US readers (though not ones from this board, I hasten to add!)

For pure pulp, the 'classic' there is Katherine Forest's Curious Wine. It's basically a straight (em, as it were) wanking book for those inclined to vanilla (or 'beach read' if you want to be polite about it), but competently done, although the setting (80's/California-type women) dates it pretty seriously.

In science-fiction land, Nicola Griffith is a terrific writer; far & away her best is Slow River, a densely-plotted book with ecological themes abt water purification & one particular corporate family & their foibles. It might be a bit technical for some readers but the unapologetically lesbian narrator & her journey are deeply sympathetic, definitely worth the effort. Her other stuff's just as well-written but grimmer & more in a noir tradition.

I've felt free to avoid The Well of Lonliness my entire life. Who needs it? So there.

And I couldn't agree more about Sarah Waters, she's gifted beyond the call of duty, & Fingersmith is as good a novel of its type as it's possible to imagine: I find it impossible to imagine anyone else writing it, much less doing it better.

Rebecca Brown is an American lesbian author who's not only not for everyone but barely for anyone: her stuff is unbelievably grim but the writing's always excellent, she alternates between short stories & novels. Probably The Gifts of the Body, abt a lesbian caretaking a gay man w/AIDS, is as good a place to start, or at least give her a try, as any. She's a highly intelligent writer, & a very fine one; short, short, simple sentences that are like surgical knives cutting away to painful emotional truths. Again, not for everyone but I think it's important to be aware she's out there. Just not an author to read for grins & yucks.

Speaking of which, I'd also include Alison Bechdel, who has to be the only woman in history to make her living entirely from selling collections of lesbian comics. If you haven't read her Dykes to Watch Out For series... what are you waiting for? ;)

Thanks Ekny,


When i get to a gay/lesbian bookstore i'll know what book to take with me!

Abzug I am with you on Sarah Waters, and agree with all that is said. Tipping The Velvet was my favorite book ever. Was brilliant and as I said in the other thread that I wanted to savor it and didn't want it to end. Made me sad. I know..I am a plonker!!

Agree, BGs... :)
Sarah Waters books are good reading.

Would also like to recommend "A Village Affair", by JoAnna Trollope
(yes, she is a descendant of the novelist Anthony Trollope)

This book is a touching story of a middle-aged woman, Alice, who is coming to terms with her own sexuality and the sacrifices and choices she makes to appease her "village" society. Trollope's books are universal in acknowledging we all have free will to choose, but that we must then bear the responsibilities/consequences of those choices.

The last few pages will have you crying/cheering for Alice as she makes the hardest decision of her life...

Check it out...

btw- it's also been made into a movie..haven't seen it

As was probably obvious to everyone, Alan Warner is also not a lesbian. :) But I agree it's surprising and intriguing that some of the best writing about lesbians should come from writers who aren't actually lesbians. Of course, gay writers write convincing straight characters ALL the time (if they didn't, every character in a Broadway musical would be gay). Part of me wonders whether lesbian writers have a few obstacles in writing truly creative fiction with lesbian themes, because I would suspect they feel some political-type obligation to represent lesbians in a certain way, or to specifically NOT represent lesbians in a certain way. And that would be somewhat limiting to creativity. Of course, sometimes lesbian writers' desire to increase lesbian visibility comes out very well (eg Bad Girls series 1-3, Sarah Waters' writing etc).

Perhaps it has to do with sterotyping and that lesbian writers try to avoid that at all cost.

I don't know. For me, the way a story is told is very important. Whether it is easy to read, the way setting are discribed. I love a book when i can really get lost in it. When i envision the surrounding, have gotten to know the characters and feel what they are feeling.

If i do get lost in a book, it doesn't matter to me if the writer is gay or straight. If he/she writes a very good lesbian book, i'll just essume they did great research on it.


Having said that, i do think it helped a lot to have gay people working on a show with gay characters. I think they will try to keep the person more real. (and not have a character go threw the motions and then turns straight again)

At it happens I just saw A Village Affair just a few weeks ago, finally found a VHS copy for rental--it was a made-for-UK-tv movie & hasn't been released on DVD. Pretty good overall, though I found the pentultimate scenes overwrought & very old-school (dated) in their treatment of lesbian angst. But the lead, Sophie Ward, was just right, very skillful, low-key performance, very watchable, I'd never seen her in anything before--and there's a lot of irony built in; she was the 'face' of Vogue in the 80s, & came out 2 years after this aired--is now married to her gf (a Korean-American writer). Ward has 2 kids from her previous marriage. It was a fairly big splash when she went to some star-studded event with her girlfriend, I think this was around 1996; the press went so nuts the whole thing upstaged Madonna, who was headlining. At the time, Ward was certainly the most prominent woman in the UK to come out by a long shot.

BBC Woman's Hour had an interview w/her in 2004, she was doing something on stage at the time.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/womanshour/2004_12_thu_02.shtml

Re lesbian/straight authors doing lesbian stories, I think part of the problem may be most lesbian writers assume they are writing genre stories (romances) for a lesbian audience, & thus basically try to just follow preexisting forms rather than do anything on their own.

Hi there, Just like to mention that Sophie Ward plays a country GP in Heartbeat the long running TV drama about a village bobby.

Thanks, BGN, good to know! :)

Oh, it just occured to me, Jeanna & I were talking about it in another thread but w/o the Search feature, damn if I can find it... anyway, Joanna Russ's Extra(ordinary) People is a terrific collection of sci-fi stories. Not all are lesbian, although the collection does include one of the best short stories about genderfuck I've ever read. Anyway, it's also out of print but worth hunting down, esp if you're into speculative fiction, as they call the more high-brow end of the genre in bookselling land.


ETA: Abzug, if you're into lesbian Judaica & can find Judith Katz's Running Fiercely Towards a High Thin Sound (if I'm remembering the rather longish title correctly), it's out of print, worked pretty well if I recall: sort of Jewish magical realism. --e

If you're referring to the Jeanette Winterson novel, ekny, I totally agree. Well written, to be sure, but... cold. That's exactly the right word. Perhaps it's because it is her first novel and she was just getting her feet under her, I don't know, but it lacks the emotional pull of her later novels. I think immediately of more emotionally lingering books she has written- "The Passion", for instance.

Love, they say, enslaves and passion is a demon and many have been lost for love. I know this is true, but I know too that without love we grope the tunnels of our lives and never see the sun. When I fell in love it was as though I looked into a mirror for the first time and saw myself.

Or the haunting, "Written on the Body". While the narrator is not gender-specified, I've always, always read it as female. I cannot recommend this book more.

This hole in my heart is in the shape of you and no-one else can fit it. Why would I want them to?

(I could have found a hundred quotes to use from that book, because the book itself is one long lyrical dream to read.)

I would also recommend the newly released, Fun Home which is a memoir of her life growing up, finding out her father was gay and dealing with that (and much more) after he dies. Great stuff. (Just to reiterate what ekny has said, it IS in comic book form, and this one in particular is collected in a large hard cover book.)


-coolbyrne

I love to hear folks recommending Some Girls, EKNY, because I've been doing that for a long time. I love that book. The settings are captured so well (New Mexico and NYC) and with the healthy doses of angst, sexual tension, and identity unraveling, it is a great read. I have wondered to myself that things seem to work out almost too well for our main character. She moves to NYC totally unprepared and lands a great job (eventually), makes friends and falls for her exotic neighbor (and gets her). What do you think?
A couple others I'd recommend that I haven't seen mentioned yet are below. Not sure if the authors are lesbians, maybe some of you all would know:

Alma Rose by Edith Forbes - an involving story of a small town girl who is content with her life on her own living with her father until a vibrant truck driver stops into her store to buy some tampons. Once again I think the author does a wonderful job of grounding the story in a place I can easily picture. The main character is very well written and is likely that no-nonsense woman you've known for years. Her one impetuous act is falling in love with Alma Rose.

Summit Avenue by Mary Sharratt - an immigrant girl making her way in America during the early 1900s. Excellent insight into the poverty faced by immigrants and the lack of opportunity for women. Luckily Katherine is in the right place at the right time and is hired by a wealthy widow to translate fairy tales for a book project.

The Kiss by Linda Cullen - Two straight irish women who are best friends since primary school, suddenly find themselves together. Not sure if this is the best written book, but the transition of their friendship into a love affair is very affecting and intriguing. The author doesn't spend a lot of discussion on how the women label themselves, and the characters themselves avoid that conversation until late in the story. Joanna and Helen love each other, but will it be enough for them to try a real relationship?

Water in a Broken Glass by Odessa Rose - An African American artist falls for a book shop owner but tries to deny her lesbianism. Interesting look at how an artist works and feels more homophobia coming from her culture which nearly causes her to have a mental breakdown. The best friend is a great character in this book because she is a psychologist and offers her advice like, "life is too short for denials and too damn long for regrets"

Pages for You by Sylvia Brownrigg - Very evocative and sensual story of a college woman falling in love for the first time with her TA. Perfectly captures the intensity of that first love.

I think these actually could loosely (maybe not so loosely) be considered coming out stories since most of them are about women recognizing and following their new feelings for other women. Then when I was thinking that was bad, that we are all tired of those types of stories, I remembered I am on this board, so I figured we all obviously do like those stories. :)

Thanks for the suggestion. It sounds very good. I have no idea how I missed this one, given some of the Jewish lesbian drek I have stooped to reading.

What are you talking about? That's exactly what life in New York City is like! Well, except the getting-a-great-job-without-any-experience part. Oh, and the falling-in-love-with-your-neighbor part. Heck, even the talking-to-your-neighbor part seems a wee bit far-fetched.

(Ever heard that song by Kander & Ebb called "Ring Them Bells"? It's about a Manhattan woman who travels all around the world to find true love, and winds up falling in love with a man she meets in Dubrovnik, and it turns out he's her next door neighbor who she'd never met.)

I loved this one, especially the "New Haven" setting (not that the author ever names it, but that's where it is), because my sister went to Yale, so I recognized so many of the locations in the novel. A quick read, but really lovely writing, characters and relationships which felt true and interesting.

Thanks for the other reccomendations, bluesycat--I hadn't heard of any of them, so I am glad to have a few more to add to my list of books to read!

Hiya, delighted to hear I'm not the only person out here who adores this book & still recommends it to people, it wasn't marketed as lesbian & completely fell through the cracks, I think. She hasn't done anything since; I read her first novel, meh; definitely a first novel & not nearly as strong. Also totally straight. (I didn't care that much abt the main char's issues.)

As for your questions, not sure: I don't think that way about books, I realize; if the writing's good enough I don't question some of the basic premises unless something's really off (for ex, I have trouble with the penultimate scene in Sugar Rush, the book, it's ott & I'm not sure it's right for the plot, or that something a little different wouldn't have served as well). The whole affair in Some Girls is unlikely if you want to look at it that way, perhaps; for me, that's kind of the point. As for landing a good job (it's not a great one--she just has a great boss), some people do get lucky: I think the idea is there's something so open and fresh about Claire that she kind of attracts a certain type of individual, she's not the kind of character people run around trying to do bad stuff to, you know?

I think the novel is hugely ambitious: here McCloy's taking one of the oldest stories in the book, small town girl goes to big city (the biggest, in a certain way, at least according to its own mythos) and did a tremendous job telling in some ways a very ordinary story--but making it wholly fresh. I couldn't ask for more, or different from this book, another mark to me of its beautiful construction; scenes emerge natively from each other, small things echo together from different parts, it makes emotional sense. And finally--again, for me it's the language, it's both clean and lush. And honest. Her first novel was titled Velocity, and that's part of her achievement here, the book's literally compelling, the language itself moves you forward even as you long to linger over it, so there's this dynamic tension happening in you, the reader, at the same time as, along with the characters.


Abzug, let me know if you find/read a copy of the Katz book, curious to know what you think of it! I'll try to pull up others I know from my brain, they're probably knocking around in there somewhere.

ETA: Woops. It was actually her other book, The Escape Artist, that moves more strongly into magical realism territory. Mea culpa. Running Fiercely feels more naturalistic (sort of), probably more autobiographical. They're not perfect, a little slow in spots, but both definitely worth reading given your interests. :)

Wow, am I braindead. I can't believe I forgot to add Nancy Garden's Annie on my Mind. This is definitely for young adults, but still one the best-done, more romantically successful lesbian YA novels out there. It's not remotely explicit, but continues to get banned from US libraries, after 20+ years. Which is of course stupid & infuriating, but also, in a weird way... I find it kind of encouraging: it ensures the book will continue to stay in print & be carried by other, independent freethinking librarians (most of them are) who want kids to have a choice in their reading materials.

I LOVE Annie on My Mind!!! Fantastic. I remember meeting up with my high school girlfriend when we were in our 20s, and she told me about the book and said it reminded her so much of us. I didn't feel the same way when I read it, but I think that's because the narrator was a little closer to her experience. I read an adult book by the same author and it wasn't even close to as good, sadly.

No, she hasn't done anything else nearly as good. I think what happens is that certain authors do something heartfelt that works, & in trying (with the best of intentions), to repeat that success and target a need in another market similar to their first hit (transgender teens who cut; somehow, though, it all winds up sounding like it should be followed by '...next, on Oprah"), wind up being programmatic--rather than writing a story they need to tell they write a story they feel they Ought to tell. In short her later novels feel formulaic & stilted. Annie may not be perfect--aspects of the plot & characterizations already feel dated to the point of being corny--but who cares: it's still a lovely story, and, critically, made clear there was another, better way to write about young kids trying to understand their sexuality: without punishing them for it through suicide or het/boyfriend-marriage solutions, or just general misery related to homosexual 'shame'. Which, astonishing as it is to me, is still very much needed 25 years later: books like this remain terribly thin on the ground.

Night Watch was shortlisted for the Booker.

Ooo. Books. It's only my favourite topic! :eek :wub:

I'd recommend 'Wild Things', by Karin Kallmaker. It's not the best book in history, but has very intriguing characters and deals w/ religion issues (catholicism), family issues, death issues and AIDS issues... Simply, a lot of issues. :lol1 Proper, good catholic girl finds herself falling for her boyfriend's sister. Oops. And it only gets better from there... :D

Also, I'm in the middle of reading 'Tea' by Stacey D'Erasmo. Adore it so far. Delicious writing. Stunning, really. A girl loses her mother and falls in and out of women in search of a very much needed emotional connection because of her loss. :cry2

Just came across this one recently. It's non fiction, but a very enlightening journey through (early) Hollywood's backstage secrets, the lavender marriages etc. I enjoyed it a lot.

Sappho goes to Hollywood
THE GIRLS

by Diana McLellan

The Wolf Ticket -- Caro Clarke

Yet another out-of-print title, sorry to say, but I reread it yesterday & it's a very solid first novel. It seems to have taken a premature path to undeserved obscurity--partly I think just bec it was published near the end of Firebrand's existence so wasn't in print very long. This is a lesbian romance (sort of--well, yeah) set during the end of WWII. The author's a translator & I think it shows; she's got a particularly good ear for how people speak (on the page) when they're not using their first language. The ending pushes plausibility somewhat but isn't a deal-breaker; this is a solid piece of storytelling with some lovely passages & a real feel for its characters' differences as well as historical setting. It's also surprisingly funny in spots--Clarke's got enough perspective on her characters to have a bit of fun with them midst all the war-torn seriousness. If you can find a copy, it's worth a bit of trouble to hunt down.

I just finished reading this book. It was a bit disconcerting at first when I realzed that that the author (Kristin McCloy) had not used quotation marks for dialog. Once I got used to that the book flowed and was an easy and enoyable read.
Having never been to NYC the descriptive narrative of the sights and sounds of the city brought the Gotham alive to me.

I was able to pick this up used on Amazon for .18 Cents. Plus about $3.50 for shipping. A real bargain!

As A Canadian, I feel that I have the best of both worlds getting US & European Novels.

Here are some that you may enjoy

Any book by Ann Bannon:

Odd Girl Out
I Am A Woman
Woman In The Shadows
Journey To A Woman
Beebo Brinker

It's sort of a Soap Opera in the sense that you see the same characters over and over again. They were written in the 1950's but still maintain a cult following.

If you go to Yahoo and Type Ann Bannon, you will find her website, and how the covers of the books changed. In fact, the original title of her first book was actually titled:

I AM A WOMAN IN LOVE WITH ANOTHER WOMAN, MUST SOCIETY REJECT ME?

She was also featured in a 1994 Documentary called "Forbidden Love, The Unashamed Stories Of Lesbian Lives" that focused on what it was like to be a Canadian Female Lesbian in the 1940's, 50's, and even the early 60's when this love was the love that dared not speak it's name.

What was also fun about this DVD is that it featured a "fictitious romance" between Laura who moved to the big city and meets "Mitch" at a Lesbian Bar.

Another wonderful book I read was called "Annie On My Mind" by Nancy Garden about how two eighteen year olds fall in love before graduating and going on to college.

Paula Christian and Elizabeth Dean are also popular and if you want some old fashioned romance for Men, read any of Gordon Merrick's Books.

Also, another fantastic writer is E. Lynn Harris & James Earl Hardy.

I'd just like to suggest Strangers in Paradise by Terry Moore.

It's a comic book, and he's a boy ... but it's an astounding series famous for drawing in the non-comic-book-loving hordes. Especially women, because his two main characters are women who are the best of friends, and possibly something more. Just fabulous, keep-you-up-all-night reading.

I love Strangers in Paradise! I've only read the first two books, and am waiting for my girlfriend to read parts 3 and 4 before I do. I got them for her as a gift and it didn't seem right to actually read them before her. It starts to seem less gift-like. I know the author is a man, but reading it, it's so hard to imagine that he is. The female characters and their relationships are so fully realized, and the male ones are so stereotypical.

i read this book a few weeks ago. i actually wanted to start with "organges aren't the only fruit" but it was already out at the library, so i got out "written on the body". i enjoyed it, but i am not totally sure i completely understand the ending, i don't want to give it away here, but if anyone wants to compare notes on what they understood happened at the end, i'd be happy to hear from them.

I read Sarah Waters' Tipping The Velvet and it's amazingly written, I truly felt like I was living back in XIXth century. I could just see the same images that Dickens evoke in me when I was younger. She nailed the style, so to speak. Not to mention the book's palpable erotism.

I also recently read Fried Green Tomatoes by Fannie Flagg and I regret that I didn't come across it any sooner. It's so good. It's set (mostly) in the first half of the XXth century and the word lesbian is never spoken, but there's so much love in that story that it's impossible not to like it.

Then there's also Three Lives by Gertrude Stein. On the back of the book, it's written that Stein was friends with many impressionists of her time and it influenced her writing immensely. And it's true, each of the three stories in the book is like a delicate painting.

The Hours by Michael Cunningham is well-known due to the movie. It's brilliant.

I'd also like to recommend my personal favorite. It's A Home at the End of the World by Michael Cunningham. It can't be classified as a "lesbian book" or as a book about lesbians, but I'm sure everyone will find something for themselves in this one. It's a tale of life, love, despair, loneliness, sexual orientation, struggle, tenderness, convictions... everything.

It has four narrators who succeed one another at times and, essentially, it's about the lives of two gay men. Two gay men who live with a bisexual woman at one point of their lives. The author shows how feeble the borders of sexual orientation actually are, if you look at them closely, he creates a triangle that can't be broken. But it's impossible to describe it and do it justice, I wish everyone could read it to see for themselves how great it is.

Oh God, I better stop or I'll end up writing a novella here.

I loved The Hours. And also Flesh and Blood, another Cunningham novel. I haven't read A Home at the End of the World, but that kind of fluid sexuality (or love which pierces through the boundaries of sexuality) seems to be a Cunningham theme.

Yes, it definitely is his theme. It's present in The Hours as well. Clarissa Vaughan being in love with Richard (and vice versa) while both of them are gay. I find MC fascinating as a writer.

I just finished reading "Daughters of Jerusalem" by Charlotte Mendelson. It was really wonderful, one of the best lesbian novels I have read in a long time, maybe ever. Top 10, definitely. And one of the most vivid and subtle depictions of a formerly heterosexual woman embarking on a lesbian affair. In a way, it was almost like getting to hear the thoughts inside Helen Stewart's head. The characters aren't identical, obviously, but the woman in this novel was thinking and feeling many of the things I have imagined Helen was thinking and feeling from the potting shed on through "I want a woman." Really going through that emotional journey from friendship to revelation to initial disgust to less-than-platonic moments to full-blown love affair. Anyway, I highly reccomend the novel. I don't know if it's been published in the US--I bought it from Amazon UK.

Thx for this recommend, I ordered it from my UK distributor; best I can tell, it wasn't released in the US.

Just want to echo Bluesycat's earlier recommendation of Pages for You by Sylvia Brownrigg. I had low expectations, but it took me about two paragraphs to realize I'd found something real. It's a lyrical exploration of first (college-age) love. We've seen it all before, but not like this. Fantastic book that must be devoured.

Has anyone talked about Girl Walking Backwards...? I don't recall, sorry if this is a repeat if so.

The protagonist's lesbianism is secondary to her totally f*cked-up familiy situation: she lives alone with her mother who, it becomes increasingly clear, isn't just another phoney, lost, new-age flake (hey, I didn't choose the SoCal setting), she's mentally ill. The language felt natural & unlabored, the story felt real (& was probably semi-autobiographical, is my guess). I don't believe the author (Bett Williams) has written anything since, which is a shame--I'd sure read it. Am fairly certain it's out of print.

It's not a typical lesbian Y/A novel (if there is such a thing): it's not a coming-out story--the protagonist's out to herself before the book starts, but has an ongoing friendship-with-benefits-mutual-j/o arrangement with a guy for half of the book--it's not a romance (well--a bit)... I guess it's just a good ole-fashioned coming-of-age story. However it classifies--I liked it a lot. It's tough, truthful, fresh, & unsentimenal.

Oh man, I just read Girl Walking Backwards. I was drawn in at first but got worn down by the darkness. So many crying fits (deserved, giving the most damaged family any girl could hope for). Such a bad choice for a girlfriend (cutter, possibly schizophrenic). And such a brief and abrupt reprieve at the end.

I agree, ekny, it must've been semi-autobiographical. It was just too raw to be otherwise. But it wasn't for me; reading it so soon after Pages For You made me appreciate the latter all the more. Sylvia Brownrigg (author of Pages) deserves to be better known.

Interesting, I didn't find it too dark. I mean yeah, some of it's tough going but I went because I cared what happened to the narrator: by the end, you know she'll survive, and the author's earned that ending. Which isn't always the case. Sorry you didn't enjoy it as much as I did, I liked the writing, thought it was very clean. (And yes, the infatuation with the cutter/goth girl is pretty sad, but it's like... so many of these kids are already roadkill, it takes a minor miracle to survive adolescence semi-intact; I guess I felt that was kind of the point.)

Speaking of which, I just read Rose of No Man's Land; Michelle Tea seems to have a pretty rabid fanbase, but her stuff's definitely not for me. The main character is a little baby white-trash dyke with a total loser family, and though the ending is survivable, I never felt this character had any real options. The high point of the novel is a long, crystal-induced haze with another throwaway kid she meets on her travels. So... if you thought GWB was too dark, I don't know that you'd like Rose of No Man's Land much: it's seriously grim. Or so I found it, anyways. --e

wow, thanks for mentioning this book. i loved it! just got it out of the library, read it in a day or so, and have already re-read most of it once or twice. i can't get it out of my head.

also, i know i'm not introducting this book to anyone new, but i think we would be remiss if we failed to mention Stone Butch Blues somewhere in this thread. very powerful, very [emotionally] difficult to read at times, but especially for younger dykes, i think it's good to get an idea of what life was really like pre-stonewall. after liking that book so very much, i was actually really disappointed in Drag King Dreams (Feinberg's most recent novel). anyone else read that one? like it? not?

Good one, msalt, thanks for remembering Stone Butch Blues--I can't believe no one mentioned that before? Geez. Maybe it was on the old board. I feel personally remiss. <hanging head low>

I didn't pick up Feinberg's new one, because honestly, I felt SBB would pretty much be it: sometimes I just have an instinct about whether someone's basically a one-novel author. I'd be glad to be wrong--I know some people who've read the new one & liked it. Regardless, my suspicion this might be the case doesn't (for me) diminish how effective or important I think SBB is--which is hard to overstate. It's a brutal book in a lot of ways but you absolutely can't (and shouldn't) put it down. It basically kickstarted what turned into the transgender movement. Great call.

Well, I'm not sure where to start with a response to the Daughters of Jerusalem, so I think I'll just say for now it was an awfully interesting read. (Her blurbs are pretty spectacular ["It was a privilege to review this book"--good heavens, what a brow-mopper! Jeez. When's the last time you read a blurb like that--man, was I floored] but I gots to say, I didn't find that many words in the book I thought were recherche, to reference another reviewer: dang. I do think it's the kind of book that inspires reviewers to imitate as a form of genuine admiration--an emotion I'm sure's pretty alien to most of them.) No question: it's a terrific story, very well-told. And in its odd, odd way, a page-turner. Which is not such an easy thing to pull off for literary fiction.

But it's hard to discuss without spoilering it, & since we don't have that feature here (which is fine, I'm not keen on it), I'm not sure ht proceed. It's a very British, very smart piece of writing. British not only bec of the setting (Oxford), or the arch, peculiar academics it parodies (an activity that's been so thoroughly done elsewhere it's kind of astonishing anyone still has the balls to take it on--of course she does it with distinction, which is I think what a lot of the reviewers particularly were applauding--which also let them neatly off the hook for discussing the book's stickier emotional aspects, perhaps, but perhaps that's unfair of me & they just didn't want to spoil it for their audiences), but also bec of Mendelson's use of dialogue, it's got an elliptical quality I'm beginning to think of as distinctly British; this tendency to underwrite dialogue... keeps us here in BG-land up late many's the night, innit). (You know, with characters having exchanges like [am making this up]: Do you--? Should...? Mm. / Well--but I--oh! Quite. / etc.--and you, the reader, actually thinking you're following along just fine.)

So I'm not sure where else to wander off to. There are a lot of very complicated characters here, all with some very unlikable traits. So they're human--deeply flawed & very screwed up. And quite credible and interesting for the most part (except the baddy, who's not supposed to be interesting bec he's just a foil).

I have different thoughts about it depending on where in the day I am, who I'm still thinking about. Today I woke up thinking, her characters (well one in particular) perform their most noble acts, consistently, with the most ignoble of motives, from a churn of evil, badly-intended impulses.

Not sure I entirely agree about the similarities to Helen's character, but I totally see what you're getting at in terms of the shape and progression of that part of the story. The people in this book--almost all of them--have a deep sense of shame and disgust about their bodies as well as their emotions, all of it, it permeates the book, or so I felt. I found it rather striking in this day & age, a bit surprising. I wasn't sure how much, if any of that, was to do with religion, or what to make of it overall. This is a very secular family in an extremely secular setting, a family from a mixed marriage with the father, presumably a Holocaust survivor--but all of that would fit into less than a page's worth of text over the course of the novel, it seemed to me. I wasn't sure exactly how heavily I *should* weigh it, & was a little surprised to see the book got as much coverage in Jewish periodicals as it did. All I can think is there must be more of a dearth of fiction about Jews than dykes, even. Which would mean almost nothing at all, as I found the content here pretty slight. What'd you make of that aspect of it, Abzug? Sorry, sort of rambling here I guess: it's a bit frustrating to not have anyone to discuss a complicated book with after you've done, if it opens more questions than it answers. And in some ways, this book does do that.

I'm really glad you liked the book e! I know she wasn't exactly Helen-like, but there were just a few thoughts/emotions she had about desire, and being desired, which seemed to me to be, perhaps, what Helen might have been thinking post-potting shed.

Well, it's got to be VERY rare in Brit Lit to have anything Jewish, given that only .5% of the UK population is Jewish (compared with 1.7% or thereabouts for the US). So perhaps given that it was UK critics writing, they really jumped on it. I'll say, I'm a bit hard-pressed to think of contemporary literary Jewish fiction by female authors, that's for sure. I think that's part of why I associated this novel with "Bee Season" because of the Jewish angle, and the academic father angle.