Bogeywoman

by Jaimy Gordon

Named one of the best books of 1999 by the Los Angeles Times , Gordon’s novel takes on the difficult subject of a young girl coming of age and falling in love with an older woman, her psychiatrist.

Genres: Fiction, Lesbian, Queer, Mental Illness, Literary Fiction, Gay, LGBT

500 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1999

About the author

Jaimy Gordon's third novel, Bogeywoman was on the Los Angeles Times list of Best Books for 2000. Her second novel, She Drove Without Stopping, brought her an Academy-Institute Award for her fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Gordon's short story, "A Night's Work," which shares a number of characters with Lord of Misrule, appeared in Best American Short Stories 1995. She is also the author of a novella, Circumspections from an Equestrian Statue, and the fantasy classic novel Shamp of the City-Solo. Gordon teaches at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo and in the Prague Summer Program for Writers.

Reviews

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jaimy Gordon lifted literary hearts all over these States when, after decades of inexplicable obscurity, she captured the 2010 Nat'l Book Award with her small-press novel LORD OF MISRULE. That title's indeed sexy & scary & more, but here on GR I'll single out her previous full-length narrative, BOGEYWOMAN. A prolonged & sensuous growl out of teenaged Ursie (bearlike, yes), the novel suffered cruel neglect when it appeared in '99, & yet though much of the book concerns Ursie's sojourn in the "bughouse" (a private asylum, outside Baltimore), the tale she spins winds up a mischievous & engaging combo of coming-out, coming-of-age, & coming-into-power. All this, in a story that does without the least shred of the merely cute. Our young narrator pays a steep price for being "a * Unbeknownst To Everybody," attracted to "girlgoyles" but not strong enough yet to express how she feels. Instead she carves up her arms & gets herself committed to the bughouse straight out of the one place she felt most at home, "Camp Chunkagunk, Tough Paradise for Girls." So too, she spends much of her hospital stay pining away in lust-love for Dr. Zuk, the spookiest of her "dreambox mechanics." Ursie's sublimations always break some rule or other, in episodes that border on the surreal, as the psych ward births a new-style camp camaraderie. There's wild music & kidnapping & finally, via perverse & delicious means, escape & transcendence to a bold though fragile maturity. But that's quite enough about character & plot, rich & nutty though they are. I can't delay any longer celebrating the novel's bumptious & resonating *language.* BOGEYWOMAN, from its title on throughout, is chockablock with American neologisms, or at least new word-combinations, & again & again these prove nothing short of enchanting. I've singled out a few above ("dreambox mechanics," whew), & I'll note that the book carries a blurb from the late, great Gilbert Sorrentino, raving about the "lavish & daring" prose -- & more than that, I've got to say that Gordon's verbal pyrotechnics never feel like showing off. Rather, what she's about here is the time-honored business of celebrating the natural world. She coins fresh linguistic equivalents for whatever catches Ursie's fancy, & in so doing reawakens the reader to all sorts of everyday miracles. There's the sound of your secret crush laughing: "cowbells bouncing down a glass staircase, that was her laughter." There are the pleasures of raccoon droppings: "the harlequin scat of that model omnivore -- fishbones, corn, a plug of purple finch feathers, all bound together and tinted with the rosy, seed-speckled pleasure of blackberry." In BOGEYWOMAN, Jaimy Gordon proves herself just such a model, & a master, supernaturally alive to "what a feast run amok the whole earth was."

[jo · Rating 4 out of 5]

this is a crazy, rollicking, fantastic, wild ride of a book into the life of young ursie koderer, a totally sane, if a little zany " * Unbeknownst To Everyone" (where * stands for, in Ursie's own words, "lesbo") who, upon discovering that she is indeed attracted to girls rather than boys, goes a little crazy and is therefore carted off from summer camp directly into the loony-bin.

except, truly, she doesn't go crazy at all. the reasons why ursie ends up in the bughouse are, as is often the case, completely serendipitous and due to a mixture whose main ingredients are: a) she draws maps and other hieroglyphics on her arms with razor blades; b) she likes girls, which c) leads her to commit various acts of minor meshugas; d) her mother is dead and her father is a famous someone who doesn't have time to devote to her daughter while having instead e) lots of dough to spend on a fancy psych hospital so that said daughter can be kept out of the way and out of trouble for two years.

in spite of its fabulistic and surreal texture this novel reads for all the world like autobiography -- also, truly, who writes a story about teenagers in the loony-bin except someone who has been there? -- and, in fact, in this startlingly honest interview jaimy gordon discloses that this is the story of her own sister (hmm, sister?), swaddled in inventive language and over-the-top picaresque-ness for disguising purposes and also because that's how jaimy gordon writes.

now this style of narrative isn't my favorite -- in fact, it's rather distant from my taste, as i really truly like my fiction to be as narrowly realistic as possible. also, i confess to having had my fill of stories about kids capering in the asylum. hence the entirely subjective docked star. this book deserves five stars for its language alone, which is truly unique and, if you like this kind of stuff, really funny.

the beauty of the story is that ursie comes into her own thanks to the unorthodox ministrations of a visiting psychiatrist from a central-asian soviet republic. this is easily the best part and i won't spoil it for you. let me just say that, under the guise of fun and story, this book contains a cutting critique of traditional freudianism and traditional psychiatry. while sending up their strictures and prohibitions, it celebrates freedom, lust, life, passion, love, sex and the miraculously healing relationships patients and therapists create with each other in spite of structures often designed to keep them apart.

[Chuck LoPresti · Rating 5 out of 5]

A unique and singular voice in literature, Jamey Gordon writes in a style that might be best described as experimental yet approachable. I read Shamp Of The City Solo a few years ago and really enjoyed the experience. To me, her writing works like great music in that it balances a unique tone with an effective use of style that creates a rhythm of expression that resonates with increasing effectiveness with repeated annunciation. When you start reading Shamp or Bogeywoman you will learn some new terms as you begin to negotiate her ornate sentences. After some familiarity the learning gives way to familiarity and appreciation. I get much out of such artistic encounters. I like brave and creative expression, especially when it's executed with skill and respect for intelligence or polite indifference otherwise. Compare something like Dock Boggs, Dock made some amazingly effective and personal bluegrass recordings in the 20s in a booze-filled session that seemed more like expunging than creating. He wasn't trying to reinvent music - he just couldn't do it any other way. He was basically ignored until students dug up the recordings later, found him in the coal mines and sent him out to record again. His influence on folk and bluegrass music is massive and the early sessions rank among the best American music ever made. Bogeywoman has yet to see this day...but I think that day is coming. Other reviewers cite Dickens (orphans and great language skills) and Salinger (coming of age and great story-telling) and I think these are very fair points of comparison but neglect the drive for creative use of language that I think you'd need to look towards Sir Thomas Browne to effectively compare. Deszo Kosztolanyi also comes to mind as Gordon changes narrative voice and combines with a deeply intuitive understanding of human life and social interaction. This is on equal display in Bogeywoman and Skylark for example.

I'm not sure I am qualified to comment on this book in terms of subject matter as I am generally not well read in queer-theory or any classics of gender identity based lit. This book is very much about a young woman wrestling with sexuality and gender identification and I don't see how anyone that calls themselves a scholar of such things could omit this book. What I do feel comfortably qualified to discuss is music and not since Platonov have I read an author with a more musically informed style. Music appears as salvation here as it does in real life. The communicative and healing efficacy of music is well known to anyone that has either a good ear, strong interest or developed skill in non-verbal tonal communication. Among the most effective applications of musical efficacy in this book occurs when music is shared among those that simply pay attention and accept music on music's terms. String up a bucket, bang a fence with your teeth, don't let the "professionals" hog all the fun and you're never alone with a song in your mouth, heart or pants. Gordon's books tickle high and low and although I never get the idea that she is trying to impress the reader there is a sense of sharing that I find engaging. This is what I love about good music - it doesn't pander and it rewards attentive engagement. There is nothing shy about this book and it might offend the easily offended but it's worth the squirm.

This is my second Gordon book but surely not my last. I have come to really love her style and just like when reading Shamp, I stopped doing other things in my life as I progressed: twenty pages or so at first sitting, fifty the next and then everything else shuts down for the rest of the experience. There are more musical comparisons to make here and I don't want to draw attention away from the book but if you dig this - you need to check out music like: Dock Boggs, Skillet Lickers, Caroliner's first few records at least, Throwing Muses and pretty much the entire Anthology of American Folk Music. Add me to the list of her greatest fans.

[Bandit · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is the sort of book that one can nod and say aha, aha, interesting without actually falling for it. Essentially a gay girl interrupted...coming of age story/coming out story set in a loony bin. The book is a twofer, it can technically be read as a linear traditional story, possibly even a love story or it can be read as an experimental language exercise. The author, and subsequently her protagonists, are wild and wily wordsmiths, cunning linguists (just can't resist a terrible pun), crafty sentence assemblers...so much so, completely distractingly so, that it completely takes over the book, making for a strangely uneven, mental and occasionally stunningly gorgeous and striking narrative. And so as such, it really is an interesting and original read. As far as judging it as a novel goes, to me it didn't fare as well. The eponymous heroine and her teenage rebellion masquerading as a prolonged stay in a mental institution, her relationships with fellow inmates and her obsession with a visiting older woman psychologist were not particularly compelling or engaging and once the love interest turned out to be as crazy as those she tries to help, the book took on an entirely new unbelievable uncomfortable direction. I'm not sure of the author was going for a heightened realism or grotesquely repulsive approach to love and sex, but she certainly succeeded in creating some viscerally unpleasant scenes and I'm far from squeamish, owning to a steady horror diet. In the end this book has a certain nontraditional appeal to it and my reaction to it might betray my conventionality as a reader in wanting a book to engage in and characters to compel and excite. It's definitely a sort of thing one must be in the mood for. I can't even imagine recommending it and I certainly didn't love it, but some of the phrase turns were really spectacular. Albeit vernacular trickery alone doesn't make for a great read.

[Alan · Rating 4 out of 5]

exuberant, and, at times, exhausting lesbian coming-of-age novel. The language just bursts out of the book as the teenage heroine has a lexicon all of her own - men for example are 'fuddies' with frog dangly bits. The mental institution where she ends up is The Bug House, God becomes 'Godzilla' (as in 'for Godzilla's sake'), girls are girlgoyles etc. The characters are strong, particularly her fellow inmates - the see through Princess (who barely eats) - and the beardy doctors (dreambox mechanics)and especially the East European doctor (female of course) she falls for, Doctor Zuk, who is very unconventional in her treatments. Freud becomes Sigmund Food, and then there's Margaret Meat. Delicious, mad but somehow true, kind of vibrating with the girl's vision. Here's an example, at random, of the writing:

It was a fuddy in a mustache, primly clipped. He was undersized down to his bones, and he had all over a kind of fallen-in spruceness and good looks, of the finger-artist type - piano tuner, radio repairman or pickpocket. A miniature, dandefied, mahogany brown fuddy, then, but old: When he sniggered, his jaw had that collapsed frogginess at the corners, like an old doctor's bag...

I know that 'collapsed frogginess' well, being so old. Anyway a wonderful book, but a bit relentless: as I say I found it a bit tiring keeping up with the neologisms, but then that's the teenagers/old gits thing ain't it.

So thanks John for bringing it to my attention. She's unknown here (in the UK).

[Oriana · Rating 5 out of 5]

Looooooooved this book when I read it a half-dozen years ago, and I'm so excited to read it again. Obvs starting out the year with a manic beautiful lesbian teenage madhouse drama will mean nothing but good things for 2012, right?

Ooo, and here's a really great interview with Jaimy another Goodreader led me to that you can read in the meantime while you're hunting for a copy of this woefully underappreciated book.

[Melanie Page · Rating 5 out of 5]

*Gordon became a bestselling author when her book Lord of Misrule won the 2010 National Book Award. Bogeywoman, despite being on the Los Angeles Times list of best books in 2000, is virtually unknown, and a simple Google search shows there is almost no information about it. I sent an e-mail to the author recently to see if she’ll agree to do an interview, but in the meantime I’m really proud to be able to share this review of my favorite book with you and add a little to the conversation about this brilliant work!

For most of my life, I have been that person who hates listening to most people read aloud. Remember the kids in class in elementary school stuttering along? (I actually kicked a boy in 4th grade because he couldn’t read; my behavior has since improved). Then there were those kids in high school who tried to read at 100 miles per hour to prove how smart they were, inevitably skipping over all punctuation and killing the rhythm. Even some authors at their own readings have a hard time making their words more lively than a used tissue. But when I got hearing aids a few years ago, I was told I needed to read aloud to strengthen the nerves in my ears that were still alive but very weak due to my hearing deficit. My husband wanted to cheer me on by volunteering as my solo audience. I started with Lynda Barry’s novel Cruddy, one of my favorite books included firmly in my “Girls Gone Wild” self-created genre. Not Girls Gone Wild the franchise, but truly girls (about 12 to 18) who are nearly feral. My husband loved Cruddy. And thus, we have been reading aloud to each other since. Our most recent “bedtime story” was Bogeywoman, an experimental, innovative, deeply moving novel.

The story begins with the narrator proclaiming that she is the Bogeywoman and that she was sent to an insane asylum. Someone named Doctor Zuk got her kicked out, but then Doctor Zuk got kicked out too. The narrator says, “But first she saved me, and that’s when I lost her — if I ever had her — unless I am her. Am I Zuk? (13). Really, this is enough to make a wimpy reader quit. It already sounds existential, and it’s only the first paragraph.

Then, our narrator begins (almost as if in mid-sentence) to tell her reader the story of how she ended up in an asylum when she wasn’t even insane (according to her — she’s the narrator). It all starts at Camp Chunkagunk, the narrator’s favorite place in the world. She’s on her 9th summer there at age 16, a true devotee. The camp has all kinds of strange names for activities: Lake Twinny, Chipmunk vs. Big Bear, Wood Wiz, Upside Down Day, Lake Sci, and Evening Pro. The narrator throws all of these terms at you as if you’re a camper yourself and don’t need much explanation. She also tosses out names — Margaret, Merlin, Suzette — but doesn’t tell you who they are. They are her sister, father, and step-mother, a hands-off family, making Ursula quite orphan-like except her dad is world famous for a puppet show he does on TV. It can get confusing. Let’s be fair, though; this narrator did explain she’d been sent to an insane asylum, so you have to just go with it.

“Going with it” is a rewarding part of Bogeywoman. A lot of times I feel like a first person narrator is really just the author using a character as a puppet to say what he/she likes. A book I know that got a lot of criticism over such puppetry was Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. Jonathan Safran Foer was accused of putting his 28-year-old voice into 9-year-old Oskar’s thoughts. The narrator of Bogeywoman is entirely her own teen. I met author Jaimy Gordon at a reading. She looks like the kind of lady whose mother signed her up for ballet and equestrian when she was two — no sign of the nutbar that is the narrator.

To help you out, should you choose to read this book (and you should), let me give you some summary of what happens to land the narrator in an asylum:

She’s at Camp Chunkagunk, age 16, floating on her back in Sourhunk Lake, when she realizes she wants to put her hand between another girl’s legs. It hits her like a freeway accident: she’s a lesbian. The narrator then goes back and explains that her name is Ursula Koderer, but everyone calls her the Bogeywoman. She earned the name when she was 7 after she put a snake down a chimney in the camp counselors’ cabin and thundered, “I’m the Bogeywoman.” But after she realizes she’s a lesbian, that’s what Bogeywoman actually means to Ursula. She’s an unhygienic girl whose descriptions of herself would make you think she were a potato with sprouts.

Ursula thinks she falls in love with her cabin mate, Lou Rae Greenrule, who’s also a strange girl. Ursula finds Lou Rae one day putting clay she found in the ground on her face as a beauty aid, but she’s sitting stark naked with only her long, long hair covering her. Ursula gets Lou Rae to head toward the perimeters of camp to find more clay, which is where Ursula makes a move on the younger girl. Lou Rae acts like she wants the physical contact, but then changes her mind, leaving Ursula out to dry!

Later, Ursula seeks out Willis Marie Bundgus (the “wood wizardess” who teaches tracking skills at the camp) for some solidarity after getting ditched. She finds Willis talking to a camp handyman, a really gumpy guy named Ottie Grayson (aren’t the names just fabulous?). Willis is trying to put the moves on ol’ Ottie, but turns out, Lou Rae promised Ottie she’d hook up with him! Ursula puts it all together and goes on a rampage. She runs away from camp, heading past the perimeter, which is punishable by expulsion from Camp Chunkagunk. As she walks, Ursula carves a map of the camp into her arms. She bleeds all over, so she takes off her shirt (she doesn’t wear a bra) to wrap her arms up. And that’s how the police find her: walking down the road, naked from the belly button up, bleeding all over the place. This is how Ursula winds up in an expensive insane asylum in Baltimore.

Now, why did I summarize so much? I never summarize so much! It’s you’re job to read the book, right? Well, the beginning of Bogeywoman can be really hard to slog through. Even my husband, dutiful listener that he is, expressed hesitancy about my continuing after the first chapter (which is 55 pages). It doesn’t seem that complicated, though, right? Here’s the thing: readers are in Ursula’s head, so she talks like Ursula. She makes up a lot of her own words, and her phrasing is a bit off. Jaimy Gordon makes use of comma splices to keep the reading practically running. There’s little room to breath. Here’s an example of Ursula’s thoughts when she finds out Lou Rae is hiding in the bushes, waiting to hook up with Ottie, and he’s walking around to find her. Ursula is hiding in a tree watching it happen:

I guess I’d watched too many Saturday serials where Hopalong Cassidy drops on Bullet from the fiery hayloft of the burning livery stable. When Ottie, whistling, passed under the apple tree I uttered a mad gargle — Keep your mitts off her — and without exactly thinking about it I dropped on his shoulders, boxed his bubblegum-pink ears with my fists, got his skinny neck in a death grip with my skinny thighs, hung upside down gasping Keep your mitts off her and pounding his stomach, and finally I let go with my thighs and plunged to earth, tackling him on the way down. “Whoa, whoa,” he was yelling, “cool it, Bogey-woman, you’re right off your noodle, whaddaya mean, off who?” The funny thing is, I wasn’t mad at him, I swear I wasn’t. It was that dirty rotten Lou Rae I was mad at, who had loved me for twelve-and-a-half minutes and left me, but I wasn’t going to put a hand on her, was I? Lemme die first.

In the above quote, you get an idea of the pacing of the sentences. However, Ursula makes up a lot of words too! Here are some of them and their meanings:

•buggy = crazy
•bug house = insane asylum
•dreambox mechanic/adjuster = psychiatrist
•Bug Motels = Ursula’s group who play music on instruments made out of hospital items in the bughouse
•girlgoyle = female
•fuddy = male
•spooky-fluted = threatening way of speaking
•* Unbeknownst to Everybody = lesbian
•sumpn = something
•godzillas sake = for God’s sakes
•momps = breasts
•oink = fuck (as in, “go oink yourself”)
•cheese = jeez

Ursula also gets names wrong, like calling her psychiatrist, Dr. Feuffer, “Foofer” and Dr. Zuk’s home “Caramel-Creamistan” (that should be Karamul-Karamistan). She mixes up famous people, too, like Sigmund Food and Margaret Meat. The made up names and words begin right away. You’re not given time to adjust and slowly learn them, you “go with it” or quite reading. If you read the book more than once, you realize Ursula gives away the whole plot early on, including the details, but in a first read, you’re just trying to figure out your head from your lower parts. I love this deep inventiveness from Jaimy Gordon.

The absolute best part of this novel are the diverse voices. Oh, God, Jaimy Gordon is so good at it. Let me give you some samples with the preface that if you read this book aloud it is so fun. You can’t NOT do the voices because Gordon spells words phonetically. Please be aware that I triple checked that there are no typos in these quotes; this is how people’s voices are written:

From Reginald — “the Regicide” — an African American orderly in the bughouse insulting Ursula:

I use to think you smart but now I see you don’t have the sense to come in out the rain. You don’t know how many pea beans make five. You don’t have the sense God gave a nanny goat. You the type climb on the mental clothesline pole to see which way the storm be passing. You ain’t got the motherwit to track a rhino in four foot of snow. You don’t know which way you at, girl. You couldn’t get there if I put you there.

(My favorite Regicide insult is when, to tell Ursula how dirty she is, he says, “You dusty as a peanut too”).

From Chug, an African American man makes a living “junking” (looking for crap to sell) who thinks Ursula is a prostitute:

You the sorriest-looking raggedy-ass girl-boy ho I ever see and that white fuzz on you arms scare a hound dog off a gut wagon. Now gone home. Get.

From Doctor Zuk, a older female dreambox mechanic Ursula falls in love with, who we learn is from Karamul-Karamistan (not a real place but definitely something Soviet-like):

With you, Miss Bogeywoman, is all game. Is funny hunger for craziness, itch for crazy. …Don’t worry, I tell no one. You are crazy like hare in March, like weasel in henhouse maybe. You want to be crazy. Is some kind mating dance with you.

From Suzette, Ursula’s step-mother, who tells Ursula she’s happy Ursula's not in the bughouse anymore (instead of an “er” sound she gives an “oi” sound):

That place was fine for a month or two…and, as I recall, the poisonnel — wasn’t his name Reginald? — was extremely kind. So helpful! But for two years, as a sort of sleepover boarding school without the school, the place was a little overpriced, don’t you think? I mean, Oi-sula, the bills are breaking your poor father’s back.

And each and every character is like this: a unique voice that you can actually hear in your head! No two characters sound the same. It’s the most amazing use of language to make characters come to life that I’ve ever experienced in a book.

I want to end by saying that Bogeywoman is about a teenage girl trying to survive as a lesbian using self-mutilation in the 1970s, a time when you were considered literally crazy if you were gay. The novel doesn’t tell you it’s set in the 1970s, but during the reading I attended, Gordon said this book was inspired by her sister, who actually spent time in an asylum for being a lesbian. But, it’s a really funny book, too. Ursula pursues Dr. Zuk with unwavering love, gets into trouble with the Bug Motels, and escapes the bughouse once or twice. I’ll end with this passage about a strange resident in the bughouse:

Why Mrs. Wilmot was still in the Teenage Ward after all these years, nobody knew. Wilmot was a skinny-shanked, potbellied old girl of around sixty, in a buttonless (or she’d have unbuttoned it) pink chemise, with skin like a wet brown bag sliding down her bones. Now that woman was crazy, which, come to think of it, did nothing for her prestige with us Bug Motels. Mostly what she did was sit on the bench just inside the entrance to the Adolescent Wing and pull up her dress and waggle the peapod, yes I mean her graypink coochie in its skimpy ring of grizzled whiskers, in full view of us all.

[Thomas Moore · Rating 2 out of 5]

Jaimy Gordon is the winner of the National Book Award for her novel Lord of Misrule. Her writing style is difficult and characters, while interesting and eccentric, are a little too much. This book is about Ursie, The Bogeywoman, who is committed for cutting herself following a botched attempt to express her feelings for another girl. She joins a band of misfits and does her best to avoid being treated by the doctors until she becomes infatuated with visiting Doctor, Dr. Zook.

Probably the most disappointing thing about this novel is that Ursie's sister appears to be the same Margaret Koderer from Lord of Misrule. She has the same name, nearly the same back story, ran away with a young man to try their luck racing horses. However, several key details don't match up. So maybe the author wasn't trying to connect the stories it is just annoying that it appears as if she tried.

[Bethany · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was browsing the general fiction section of a book fair earlier this year, and the title of this book caught my eye. As I was reading the back I realized... I was holding a book about a lesbian. *angel chorus* I love it when that happens. Thanks, book gaydar!

This was an odd and interesting story written with a unique voice, which I had to pay close attention to, or else I would get quite lost. The back cover made this book sound as if it was some sort of epic star-crossed love story, but it didn't really feel that way. (Maybe because it took me a week or two to read the first half, and only a couple days to read the second half where Dr. Zuk comes in.) But as the story of an Unbeknowst to Everyone finding her way, it was an extremely strange yet somehow satisfying read.

[Tammy · Rating 1 out of 5]

I only got about 1/4 of the way through this book. While i was able to follow the gist of the story, the language and writing style was hard to follow. I did not enjoy this at all.

[cherry ♡ · Rating 2 out of 5]

*2.5, i guess?

what the fuck did i just read, even?

[Eleanor Stone · Rating 4 out of 5]

Found this when I was living in Toronto and only reading books from the little Libraries of free second hand books that all over the city. So glad I found this one!

[Erin · Rating 3 out of 5]

More of a 3.5. She's a got a unique & admirable writing style, and creates a dreamlike world for her characters. Quite reminiscent of Catcher in the Rye. But she (intentionally?) made the characters difficult to empathize with, and the ending was disappointing, reeking with a "...and then she woke up" approach. It was a quick read.

[Erin O'Riordan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don't remember precisely when I read this novel, but I do recall that it was quite bold and that I enjoyed it very much. Having had little other exposure to lesbian literature at the time, I appreciated that this book broached the theme.

[Richard · Rating 5 out of 5]

classic lesbian literature

[Janet Gardner · Rating 4 out of 5]

Strange, but compelling. I'm glad I read it, but I'm not exactly ready to recommend it to my friends...

[Cassie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Review is up.

OBSESSED with the language in this one. OBSESSED.

[Lauren Lindley · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not the way I wanted to kick start my 2016 reading list. Meh.

[Kenneth Timmerman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Absolutely hilarious. Meant to be read aloud. Set aside your prejudices about the subject-matter and read for the language, the wit, and the sheer preposterous of the story line. Jaimy Gordon does "voices" with an authenticity that is rare and unforced.