Patient Women

by Larissa Shmailo

Larissa Shmailo’s Patient Women tells the story of Nora, a gifted young woman who comes of age in New York against heavy odds. Her Russian mother is demanding; the young men around her are uncaring; and her dependence on drink and sex leads her to a shadowy life filled with self-made demons. Yet Nora’s intelligence pulls her through the difficult times—there are even moments of (very) dark humor here. As well, an appendix of poems attributed to Nora lets us into the corners of her heart and mind.
—Thaddeus Rutkowski, author of Haywire

Larissa Shmailo’s novel, Patient Women (and the title is absolutely meaningful, in so many ways), is a brutally honest wrestling match of truth-telling and sex. I had to put this book down and walk away from it more than once; it was a bit like holding a hot coal in my hands. And even though the subject matter is over the top, the writing is stylistically brilliant. Absolutely recommended!
—Ron Kolm, author of Suburban Ambush and editor of the Evergreen Review

Larissa Shmailo's Patient Women explores the intersection of mind and body, posing several compelling philosophical questions to the reader: Is gender biological or do we inscribe these social categories through our use of language? Is it possible to separate one's intellect from one's physical being? To what extent is language itself tactile and embodied? As Shmailo teases out possible answers to these questions, she utilizes a variety of literary forms, which include diary entries, appendices, poems, and vignettes. Formally adventurous and engaging, Shmailo's book is as artfully written as it is thought-provoking, offering us stylistic innovation that is both daring and meaningful.
—Kristina Marie Darling, author of Scorched Altar: Selected Poems & Stories 2007–14

Larissa Shmailo’s newest work, Patient Women, is an unflinching exploration of the lasting damage some people can inflict on their children. Nora, Shmailo’s protagonist, evolves as she struggles to understand and heal her own self-hatred and her on-going self-destructive choices. Slogging one's way through a morass of denial and repression is a strong trope throughout this raw, honest book. Nora is fiercely vulnerable and the sympathetic hero of her own salvation. This novel is dark, but there is hope that even the pain one lives through can cause one to create, finally, lasting and beautiful art.
—Joani Reese, author of Dead Letters (Červená Barva Press ) and Night Chorus, forthcoming from Lit Fest Press



Nora, born to a holocaust survivor mother, finds herself, at the threshold of adolescence in “boring Queens.” Lying about her age, her first transgression from her mother’s iron rule, she begins a series of ill-fated attempts to put distance between herself and the familial web she so desperately wants to disentangle from. She reels from one dysfunctional relationship to another, druggies, pimps, losers, and masochists, searching for her lovable self. This novel unfolds in a whirlwind that is sometimes dream, sometimes nightmare, yet, at its core, is an honest tale of one woman’s coming to terms with her past in order to claim her present. Be ready to have your heart broken and then made whole.
—Bonny Finberg, author of Kali’s Day



Christ-figures are likely to be cross-dressers in this engaging bildungsroman, which takes us on a wild ride through NYC nightclubs of the 1970's, rock-bottom blackouts, a whorehouse, and the slogan-filled rooms of recovery. Surreal and lyrical, then bawdy and riotous, then plainspoken and tragic, Patient Women had me rooting hard for its lovable, drowning heroine to keep her head above water and let in grace.
—Anne Elliott, author of The Beginning of the End of the Beginning

312 pages, Paperback

First published June 9, 2015

About the author

Larissa Shmailo's new book is Dora / Lora, a poetry collection about the mass starvation in the Ukraine in the 1930s and the role of Ukrainian collaborators in the Nazi death camps seen through the lens of one family. Her latest self help book is the Writing Resilience Workbook, a book of prompts desgned to elicit elements of the writer's story and form the basis of a memoir. Larissa is the leader and writing coach for the Writing Resilience Workshop for writers and aspiring writers affected by trauma, addiction, and/or mental illness. Larissa's most recent novel is Sly Bang (Spuyten Duyvil); her first novel is Patient Women (BlazeVOX). Her poetry collections are Dora / Lora (Unlikely Books), Medusa’s Country (MadHat), #specialcharacters (Unlikely Books), In Paran (BlazeVOX), the chapbook A Cure for Suicide (Červená Barva Press), and the e-book Fib Sequence (Argotist EBooks). Her poetry CDs are The No-Net World and Exorcism; tracks are available from iTunes, Amazon, Deezer, Spotify, and most digital distributors. Shmailo’s work has appeared in the anthologies Measure for Measure: An Anthology of Poetic Meters (Penguin Random House), Words for the Wedding (Penguin), Contemporary Russian Poetry (Dalkey), Resist Much/Obey Little: Poems for the Inaugural (Spuyten Duyvil), and many others. Shmailo is the original English-language translator of the first Futurist opera Victory over the Sun by Alexei Kruchenych, performed at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Garage Museum of Moscow, the Brooklyn Academy of Art, and theaters and universities worldwide. Shmailo also edited the anthology Twenty-first Century Russian Poetry (Big Bridge Press) and has been a translator on the Russian Bible for the Eugene A. Nida Institute for Biblical Scholarship of the American Bible Society. Please see more about Larissa at her website www.larissashmailo.com . https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larissa....

Reviews

[Evan · Rating 5 out of 5]

I thought this book looked me in the eye and dared me to keep up. There are times I wished Ms. Shmailo was a less gifted storyteller as her protagonist Nora's turbulent history accumulated detail by detail, a brick by brick walling in of her life. With a symphonic score-like style complete with spiraling themes and backtracking recapitulations (a tiny mercy in case the reader lost pace), there is no doubt a master is at work. There is even an appendix of brilliant poetry that becomes a jazzband distillation, a coda, of the generational storylines. If you have read Ms. Shmailo before, this is everything you have waited for in a novel by her. And so much more.

[Kathleen Gamble · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading Larissa Shmailo’s new book, Patient Women, is like riding a wave. It easily flows from one thing to the next and you want to keep reading and reading. This book has it all. Sex, drugs, alcoholism, suicide, incest, tragedy, love, despair, hope, rebirth. What will the main character Nora do next? She compels you to find out.

Nora starts out as a juvenile delinquent who runs away from home and loses her virginity. From there we see her easily get into two highly respected colleges only to lose interest and drop out. She is a brilliant woman who can’t figure out who she is or what she should be doing. So she tries everything.

She keeps getting derailed by her own mental illness and her dysfunctional family. She has a therapist who she hates and he really doesn’t seem very helpful. He loads her up with one drug after another. Her parents survived the holocaust and that still haunts them and plays out in several dysfunctional ways throughout her life. They are not a very good support system for her. It isn’t until she joins AA and reunites with an old friend that she starts to understand the meaning of love.

In the end we don’t know if she lives happily ever after but her demons seem to be at bay and she finds her way as a poet.

I first met Larissa in high school. She was intelligent, funny and a wonderful actress. Now she is a brilliant writer as well.

[Texjim · Rating 3 out of 5]

This story set in middle class NYC follows the adolescent daughter of immigrant Russians who survived the German death camps of WWII. The smart but cynically bored teenager's quiet and "apparently" ordered life quickly dissolves into a downward spiral of alcohol, drugs and prostitution. Through middle age she continually appears to struggle back to the surface only to be sucked under again primarily by alcoholism and poor decisions. She finally is taken in by a sympathetic friend whose advice and concern she completely disregards. Some hope and a philosophical lift is provided the reader by her AA sponsor and a former prostitute/colleague who have successfully made it out of the mire. The conclusion of the story seems to indicate her problems arose from gross sexual abuse as a young child but the text becomes quite muddy with this reader unable to determine what was reality and what was imagined. There is an epilogue of mostly sad prose poetry mostly about evil.

Though the story is dark, the writer engages the reader and writing flows easily. However this is a morality play without much catharsis. It seems the moral is "escape is possible" but not easily achieved; for most, the scars are permanent.

[Randi · Rating 4 out of 5]

A difficult but powerful book. It follows Nora, the daughter of Russian immigrants and Holocaust survivors living in Queens, through her sexual history. It is disturbing to read of her as a young teenager being taken advantage of by older hippies in a crash pad in the East Village. She is very bright, is accepted into Brown and Barnard, but has too many problems to maintain her studies. The book follows her through the glitzy New York worlds of Studio 54 and Plato's Retreat.

A section of vignettes about the life in the concentration camps, ostensibly told by the mother, is fascinating.

[Gerald sliker jr · Rating 4 out of 5]

I WON FROM GOODREAD.

I FIND A INTERESTING STORY. BUT NOT FOR CHILDREN TO READ. I ALSO ENJOY READING IT

AND WILL GIVE TO OTHERS TO READ. I WOULD RECOMMEND IT ALL AO.