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Suicide Blonde
Vanity Fair called this intensely erotic story of a young woman's sexual and psychological odyssey "a provocative tour through the dark side." Jesse, a beautiful twenty-nine-year-old, is adrift in San Francisco's demimonde of sexually ambiguous, bourbon-drinking, drug-taking outsiders. While desperately trying to sustain a connection with her bisexual boyfriend in a world of confused and forbidden desire, she becomes the caretaker of and confidante to Madame Pig, a besotted, grotesque recluse. Jesse also falls into a dangerous relationship with Madison, Pig's daughter or lover or both, who uses others' desires for her own purposes, hurtling herself and Jesse beyond all boundaries. With Suicide Blonde, Darcey Steinke delves into themes of identity and time, as well as the common — and now tainted — language of sexuality.
200 pages, Paperback
First published September 1, 1992
80 people are currently reading
3634 people want to read
About the author
Darcey Steinke
29 books185 followersDarcey Steinke is an American author and educator known for her evocative novels and thoughtful nonfiction. She has written five novels, including Up Through the Water, Suicide Blonde, Jesus Saves, Milk, and Sister Golden Hair. She is also the author of the spiritual memoir Easter Everywhere and Flash Count Diary, a meditation on menopause and natural life. Her fiction often explores the intersection of the spiritual and the physical, with two of her novels, Up Through the Water and Jesus Saves, selected as New York Times Notable Books of the Year. Steinke has contributed essays and articles to publications such as The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, Vogue, and The Guardian, and co-edited the essay collection Joyful Noise with Rick Moody. In addition to her writing career, she has taught creative writing at institutions like Princeton University, Columbia University, Barnard College, and the American University of Paris. Originally from Oneida, New York, and the daughter of a Lutheran minister, Steinke now lives in Brooklyn with her husband, journalist Michael Hudson, and their daughter. A former guitarist for the band Ruffian, she continues to explore the connections between art, spirit, and human experience through her work.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 279 reviews
July 16, 2023
This book is my all time favorite modern novel. I read it every year, I think I've read it six times now, but to me, this book was a welcome and needed journey down a dark rabbit hole I needed to explore. The descriptiveness of the writing is revelatory. The book reads like poetry. It gave me a sense of hope for my own life. I was married to a bisexual man whom I adored, a former stripper and "hustler" who simply could not be faithful to me. I could relate to so much of the story line, and the characters, Jessie, Bell, Madison and Madam Pig. It is a dark, lonely, sad walk down deserted streets with fallen and doomed people who won't and cannot be saved. How many of those same characters have you seen in your own life? Too many for many people In so many ways I felt the proverbial connection to Jessie. Her intense solitary loneliness, her desire for goodness and to protect and love this man, who is so clearly intent on destroying himself. To want to save him, to be unable to save him. The language is lush, beautiful. The characters broken and yet the thinnest veil of hope seems to survive somehow. The book was immensely popular when it first came out in the early 90's and it continues to be. Perhaps that's why on June 7th, 2017 Maggie Nelson of The Paris Review wrote an article on the 25th "anniversary" of its publication and why it is still such a beautiful story. Its THAT good, that seminal and important to American culture and the world of letters. I realize I'm a nut about this book but I've got valid reasons to be. It reads like poetry, like a song, drifting along the periphery of your awareness and Jessie and Bell haunt you, just like those other people in your life haunt you. Excellent novel, wonderful read and I cannot recommend this book enough.
October 14, 2007
What i learned: sometimes, even a not-that-great book can break your heart. It wasn't very satisfying, but i kept reading thinking that there would be something profound in there, but mostly, it was just very sad and empty.
February 6, 2022
didn’t shower and brooded the whole damn time I read this
October 19, 2018
Smoky rooms, dangerous streets, sleazy sex, lit by neon, to a soundtrack of the 'Liebestod' from Tristan and Isolde, edgy, intense, brutal, where love is tainted but a heart might still be pure, drugs and dreams, purple prose, urban and urbane, Baudelaire meets Kerouac via Anais Nin and Sylvia Plath, love and lust, dirt and desire, experience and annihilation, hypnotic, seductive, lyrical, moody and melancholy, a hymn to loneliness and failed connections, modernity and loss - gorgeous, gorgeous!
Many thanks to Canongate for an ARC via NetGalley
Many thanks to Canongate for an ARC via NetGalley
August 22, 2008
Suicide Blond’s first sentence “Was it the bourbon or the dye fumes that made the pink walls quiver like vaginal lips?” threw me off immediately. I like a little foreplay at least in the first paragraph, and the introductory sentence left me feeling like the victim of a literary drive by. This is not to say that I am prudish, especially in my reading, but this sentence was crafted just to shock the reader. It left a bad taste in my brain, but not as much as the main character. Jesse is self involved and shallow, as far as characters go. She blames those in her life for making her feel inadequate, but I believe she is projecting. Normally, this would not bother me, but we are supposed to identify with her and pity her, something I cannot bring myself to do. She moves from Bell to Pig to Madison, seeking someone who will ultimately take care of her and give her meaning. Jesse thinks she can punish Bell for not loving her enough by running off to live like a bad girl only to return and tell him all of the horrible things she is doing, further showing that it was not out of self discovery but to snub someone who already doesn’t care what she does. I found the rest of her characters fascinating and lifelike, albeit somewhat stereotypical. It is the protagonist that falls short and contributes to the novel’s wanting.
It would be easier to enjoy this novel were it not for the dreamy way you meander through the pages. Reading it feels ephemeral; I found myself striving towards a plot that tried to evade me at every turn. The structure is labyrinthine, and I do not mean that to be complimentary. Occasionally there is a beautiful gem of a sentence that you go back over and digest before moving on to the next random plot contrivance. It is obvious that underneath the indifference that Steinke possesses talent, she is just doing too good of a job hiding it under a boring plot.
Steinke wishes to take the reader to a place that she believes is dark and cutting edge. She wants you to see how troubled Jesse is and pity her in her own self involvement. I came away believing Jesse to be responsible for her own problems and experiencing a sense of lost time; I know I read it and I know time has passed, but there isn’t much to show or remember what happened between the covers. It was not that I found myself lost in the literary world but that I found myself in limbo just outside of it. I finished with indifference. Even Suicide Blond’s ending is anticlimactic and failed to draw me in enough to feel any kind of closure. Then again, it also failed to invest me in the story so I figure I didn’t lose out. It reads like a first novel for someone who shows great promise but just doesn’t know how to show it yet; the only problem with Suicide Blond is that Steinke has published before, which I find regretful.
By far it is not the best novel I have ever read, but Suicide Blond is also not the worst (you should hear what I have to say about House of Sand and Fog). I doubt I’ll ever pick it up again to read in its entirety, but there are a few sentences there that I, even now, want to read over again. This gives me a glimmer of hope that Steinke may put something else out that is really worth reading one day and gets across the beauty of prose that ghosts throughout the novel. I wanted to like this book. I really did. I tried, and I failed.
It would be easier to enjoy this novel were it not for the dreamy way you meander through the pages. Reading it feels ephemeral; I found myself striving towards a plot that tried to evade me at every turn. The structure is labyrinthine, and I do not mean that to be complimentary. Occasionally there is a beautiful gem of a sentence that you go back over and digest before moving on to the next random plot contrivance. It is obvious that underneath the indifference that Steinke possesses talent, she is just doing too good of a job hiding it under a boring plot.
Steinke wishes to take the reader to a place that she believes is dark and cutting edge. She wants you to see how troubled Jesse is and pity her in her own self involvement. I came away believing Jesse to be responsible for her own problems and experiencing a sense of lost time; I know I read it and I know time has passed, but there isn’t much to show or remember what happened between the covers. It was not that I found myself lost in the literary world but that I found myself in limbo just outside of it. I finished with indifference. Even Suicide Blond’s ending is anticlimactic and failed to draw me in enough to feel any kind of closure. Then again, it also failed to invest me in the story so I figure I didn’t lose out. It reads like a first novel for someone who shows great promise but just doesn’t know how to show it yet; the only problem with Suicide Blond is that Steinke has published before, which I find regretful.
By far it is not the best novel I have ever read, but Suicide Blond is also not the worst (you should hear what I have to say about House of Sand and Fog). I doubt I’ll ever pick it up again to read in its entirety, but there are a few sentences there that I, even now, want to read over again. This gives me a glimmer of hope that Steinke may put something else out that is really worth reading one day and gets across the beauty of prose that ghosts throughout the novel. I wanted to like this book. I really did. I tried, and I failed.
May 13, 2008
I read this book when I was in the army, just as I was starting to seriously begin writing, and not very long after my own first ill-fated trip to San Francisco. The book was like a hard shock in my veins; Steinke was the first person in my general age group (give or take, I was born in 1970, not sure of her) who was writing the kind of fiction I wanted to write, or thought I wanted to write. She was restricted by little, passionate in all things, and writing about people that no one else was much interested in.
May 14, 2012
It's been a while since I had the dubious honor of reading precious MFa "literature." The sort of literature where Everything means Something, where everything's articulate, where all is symbol, where nothing has air to breath. Where perfectly orchestrated set-pieces march tiredly across the page in such a formation to make them easier for you to underline for your life-suffocating English class.
But what did I expect from a book that gets its title from an INXS song?
Now a new man, I would have normally stopped reading this after Chapter 1, but I've had this book for such a long time (published in 1992, it was probably no more than 5 years old when I bought it at a yard sale. Ah, how time flies!) I suffered through its pretentious prose, its overly-analyzing, cloyingly cynical processing of artificial situations, all to my own undoing.
When characters talk (when they do talk, after pages of glossy glossing-over dull thoughts) it is like no person has ever talked in the whole history of talking:
"You're not one of those people who consider seeing your parents argue intense?"
"I think seeing a seagull with a broken wing on the side of the road can be just as horrible as-"
"As what?" Madison asked. "Getting raped?"
There are no truths, no wisdom, nothing to be found in this book, just a smear of common MFA cliches tiredly and randomly presented in mediocre "literary" writing for which we are supposed to pat the author on the back:
"The fat woman ran her vacuum and I was reminded intensely of the abortion I had had in college. The suck of the vacuum, the rich smell of blood, and how afterward I stayed in my room with the blinds closed and the lights off for several days. I had the sensation of being completely empty, like standing in your old room the minute after the last box has been carried out. I remember going outside in my nightgown to a bench in the sunlight. Nothing that came before that moment seemed real. As if I woke, not just from three days, but from a whole lifetime of sleep."
Um, okay.
Even though he is dead on the page, the narrator's boyfriend is still an insufferable, mopey douchebag, as played by Ethan Hakwe if there ever was a movie. In fact, all the characters are dead on the page, dull, lifeless husks in which the narrator/author projects whatever mindless pretty prose fancies her at the moment:
"And Bell was gay, or at least ambivalent enough to make the idea of marriage ridiculous. But even if I were a man, as I often used to wish, I couldn't stop him from going down. It was what he wanted. I could tell the way he held his cigarette, how when he spoke he looked coldly through my head and into the next world."
There is so much tell with the characters, so much projection of philosophies and insights which are never felt because they are never shown. They are not real people, they are personifications.
Nothing in this book seems like it is real. It feels like the writings of a first-time author self-consciously writing a book of perfectly neat, smoetheringly beuatiful words.
Oh, how it reminds me of my own words! How it reminds me of my own first-time authorship. The comparison is hurtful and startling and embarassing. But if this can get published, than so I suppose can I.
How easy it was to gloss boredly, angrily, frustratingly over every over-packaged, suffocating paragraph. You can tell the talent is there, it just needs room to grow. A story worth telling. Some truth, some life rather than pretty, MFA-approved lettering.
Perhaps I am tired of MFA "Literature" because I have been reading so much pulpy genre novels lately? Perhaps self-indulgent whiny literature bores me now because I have become so accustomed to gritty, exciting sleaze?
No, rubbish: this book is rubbish.
Ugh, to think this is the book I read as I turned 30! Although the character, being 29, and wallowing in over-intellectualized self-pity makes it a good addition to my Gen X/Slack lit collection, of which my interest in is quickly dying.
(As an aside, no less than three men told me the book's maxim-pin-up-like cover made them interested in the book. Sex sells!)
But what did I expect from a book that gets its title from an INXS song?
Now a new man, I would have normally stopped reading this after Chapter 1, but I've had this book for such a long time (published in 1992, it was probably no more than 5 years old when I bought it at a yard sale. Ah, how time flies!) I suffered through its pretentious prose, its overly-analyzing, cloyingly cynical processing of artificial situations, all to my own undoing.
When characters talk (when they do talk, after pages of glossy glossing-over dull thoughts) it is like no person has ever talked in the whole history of talking:
"You're not one of those people who consider seeing your parents argue intense?"
"I think seeing a seagull with a broken wing on the side of the road can be just as horrible as-"
"As what?" Madison asked. "Getting raped?"
There are no truths, no wisdom, nothing to be found in this book, just a smear of common MFA cliches tiredly and randomly presented in mediocre "literary" writing for which we are supposed to pat the author on the back:
"The fat woman ran her vacuum and I was reminded intensely of the abortion I had had in college. The suck of the vacuum, the rich smell of blood, and how afterward I stayed in my room with the blinds closed and the lights off for several days. I had the sensation of being completely empty, like standing in your old room the minute after the last box has been carried out. I remember going outside in my nightgown to a bench in the sunlight. Nothing that came before that moment seemed real. As if I woke, not just from three days, but from a whole lifetime of sleep."
Um, okay.
Even though he is dead on the page, the narrator's boyfriend is still an insufferable, mopey douchebag, as played by Ethan Hakwe if there ever was a movie. In fact, all the characters are dead on the page, dull, lifeless husks in which the narrator/author projects whatever mindless pretty prose fancies her at the moment:
"And Bell was gay, or at least ambivalent enough to make the idea of marriage ridiculous. But even if I were a man, as I often used to wish, I couldn't stop him from going down. It was what he wanted. I could tell the way he held his cigarette, how when he spoke he looked coldly through my head and into the next world."
There is so much tell with the characters, so much projection of philosophies and insights which are never felt because they are never shown. They are not real people, they are personifications.
Nothing in this book seems like it is real. It feels like the writings of a first-time author self-consciously writing a book of perfectly neat, smoetheringly beuatiful words.
Oh, how it reminds me of my own words! How it reminds me of my own first-time authorship. The comparison is hurtful and startling and embarassing. But if this can get published, than so I suppose can I.
How easy it was to gloss boredly, angrily, frustratingly over every over-packaged, suffocating paragraph. You can tell the talent is there, it just needs room to grow. A story worth telling. Some truth, some life rather than pretty, MFA-approved lettering.
Perhaps I am tired of MFA "Literature" because I have been reading so much pulpy genre novels lately? Perhaps self-indulgent whiny literature bores me now because I have become so accustomed to gritty, exciting sleaze?
No, rubbish: this book is rubbish.
Ugh, to think this is the book I read as I turned 30! Although the character, being 29, and wallowing in over-intellectualized self-pity makes it a good addition to my Gen X/Slack lit collection, of which my interest in is quickly dying.
(As an aside, no less than three men told me the book's maxim-pin-up-like cover made them interested in the book. Sex sells!)
November 22, 2023
not sure how to feel about this. i’m always here for a character-driven book with not much plot, some of my favourite books fall under that description, but i just wanted a little more from this. the reading experience somehow felt cold and grimy - i guess very 90s?? can’t confirm though as i wasn’t born. enjoyed the writing style though.
July 17, 2022
2.7/5
an interesting read, full of sexual scenes, lots of pondering of the meaning of life and people and relationships.
i feel like every character was pointless but two. i was mostly bored, the writing somehow dense, and skimmed over extremely long paragraphs.
a quick and easy read, maybe good for the sad girl book lovers.
an interesting read, full of sexual scenes, lots of pondering of the meaning of life and people and relationships.
i feel like every character was pointless but two. i was mostly bored, the writing somehow dense, and skimmed over extremely long paragraphs.
a quick and easy read, maybe good for the sad girl book lovers.
February 21, 2024
I want to shred this book into little pieces of paper, boil it until it’s soup, and inject it into my veins.
April 16, 2011
I read this when I was in my late teens and I remember highlighting it all over the place. I was depressed and miserable and this book was my only friend. My rating is based on what this book meant to me then, not so sure how I'd feel about it now.
July 16, 2023
The premise of this book was interesting but the exception was just so weird
April 26, 2016
There were moments of bravura writing here; lots of well expressed thoughts about life, love, mortality. The sum of the parts definitely is greater than the whole. For some reason the book's meandering arc undercut the sustenance of the mood, at least for me. I did learn a little about the psychology of women who hang on with dreamy loser men. The sensationalistic, seedy aspects of the book that have been so touted did not strike me as being really that shocking or original. Like better books before it (eg., The Day of the Locust) it is yet another attempt to capture the seediness of sunny California and its broken dreamers and human detritis. In the end, I wished the book had been more about Madison. I wanted to know more about her, but the necessary limitations of Jesse's perspective in regard to her prevents this. Oddly, even though it is written smoothly, I found myself wearied by this story and could only take it in 10-page chunks. It took me days to read when it should only have taken a few hours.
I would give this a moderate thumbs up.
I think I'd like to give Steinke another go, particularly her "Jesus Saves," which seems to be even more acclaimed. (Interjection: As I am slightly revising this review, I have since read Jesus Saves and it was wonderful.)
--------
EARLIER THOUGHTS as I was reading:
SEE FINAL THOUGHTS AT BOTTOM:
INITIAL:
Dark side, sexuality, quick read. Think this might suit me right now. But, really, the girl on the cover renders me a complete simpleton. I fell for it, like a horse after a carrot. I freely admit.
She writes well. Good scene setting. Main character seems like a fish out of water, straddling the hetero and gay milieu in San Fran. Sometimes she overreaches metaphorically, the author. Bothered me a bit that the editors failed to catch the word rhythms spelled with an extra y. The Grove Press is no fly-by-night... Whatever.
QUARTER:
Far enough in now to remark. A solid read. Some cool observations about love. Learning more about the female mind. Hits a roadblock for me, though, with the character of Madame Pig. I feel like I've walked into someone else's novel. The eccentric pathetic fat woman fag hag. Is she Miss Havesham or the woman from Gilbert Grape or something from Flannery O'Connor or JK Toole or Armistead Maupin or that John Behrendt book? The fact that I'm thinking all that does not bode well. Hopefully we can get back to more self brooding and sex.
HALFWAY:
It still hasn't quite shifted into high gear year, but the Jesse/Madison dynamic is heating up a little, with not-so-subtle hints of Persona-like doubling between them: each dying their hair the opposite color of their natural shade; the similarity in looks and body type; the accidental mutual connections, etc. So far this book strikes me as uneven; there are passages of confidence and great thoughtfulness from the author alternating with some less sure, sophomoric prose.
I would give this a moderate thumbs up.
I think I'd like to give Steinke another go, particularly her "Jesus Saves," which seems to be even more acclaimed. (Interjection: As I am slightly revising this review, I have since read Jesus Saves and it was wonderful.)
--------
EARLIER THOUGHTS as I was reading:
SEE FINAL THOUGHTS AT BOTTOM:
INITIAL:
Dark side, sexuality, quick read. Think this might suit me right now. But, really, the girl on the cover renders me a complete simpleton. I fell for it, like a horse after a carrot. I freely admit.
She writes well. Good scene setting. Main character seems like a fish out of water, straddling the hetero and gay milieu in San Fran. Sometimes she overreaches metaphorically, the author. Bothered me a bit that the editors failed to catch the word rhythms spelled with an extra y. The Grove Press is no fly-by-night... Whatever.
QUARTER:
Far enough in now to remark. A solid read. Some cool observations about love. Learning more about the female mind. Hits a roadblock for me, though, with the character of Madame Pig. I feel like I've walked into someone else's novel. The eccentric pathetic fat woman fag hag. Is she Miss Havesham or the woman from Gilbert Grape or something from Flannery O'Connor or JK Toole or Armistead Maupin or that John Behrendt book? The fact that I'm thinking all that does not bode well. Hopefully we can get back to more self brooding and sex.
HALFWAY:
It still hasn't quite shifted into high gear year, but the Jesse/Madison dynamic is heating up a little, with not-so-subtle hints of Persona-like doubling between them: each dying their hair the opposite color of their natural shade; the similarity in looks and body type; the accidental mutual connections, etc. So far this book strikes me as uneven; there are passages of confidence and great thoughtfulness from the author alternating with some less sure, sophomoric prose.
June 22, 2007
This book seemed really self-indulgent to me. Angst can be okay if it is made to serve a larger purpose or illuminate the reader in some fashion (Catcher in the Rye, for example). I don't think Suicide Blonde accomplished that.
January 17, 2024
I never heard of this book until I watched an Ana Wallace Johnson YouTube video. Based on what she had to say about it, I was intrigued. Beneath the neon lights of San Francisco, there’s a dark underbelly of opium, madames, brothels, drug dealing, and murder. This is a highly erotic story that was published at the height of the grunge era. The best way I can describe this book is “dank” and “descriptive” because it took us there. This is not the San Francisco I know; like many major cities in the world, it’s so unrecognizable thanks to time and gentrification. Suicide Blonde by Darcey Steinke is a cult classic like an urban fairytale about a twenty-nine-year-old adrift.
Jesse is desperate to keep her bisexual boyfriend Bell who only seems to keep her around to keep from being identified as gay. He is thinking about an ex-lover named Kevin who was the love of his life. Jesse and Bell’s relationship is practically dead but neither of them wants to move on. Jesse is helping out Madame Pig, a grotesque recluse who keeps mentioning her “daughter” Madison to Jesse. Once Jesse meets Madison, she enters a world of prostitution and sex. To describe this as an odyssey would be accurate because this was quite the journey.
No character stands out as a favorite or someone as the least favorite because this felt like a little bit of a fever dream. I did sympathize with the main character at points because she’s leaving her twenties and coming to terms with her life. As someone who has done that recently, it’s both illuminating and alarming. Thinking about the first 30 years of my life; the relationships (or situationships), the mistakes, the time wasted… it’s eye-opening. While we may not relate in other areas, I got that.
I’ve never taken opium, nor do I intend to but I imagine that reading this book would be like being in a hazed-out opium den. There were times when I barely knew what was going on and it was a bit like a grunge Alice in Wonderland. I enjoyed how descriptive this book was and how real it felt. Steinke undressed this character Jesse in front of us. The only “weak” point is how aimless it feels in some parts. I believe what happening here but there are times when I question why I’m being told something.
There are some triggering parts of this book, particularly the last couple of pages because of a descriptive suicide. This book is moody and melancholy but in an oddly comforting way.
Jesse is desperate to keep her bisexual boyfriend Bell who only seems to keep her around to keep from being identified as gay. He is thinking about an ex-lover named Kevin who was the love of his life. Jesse and Bell’s relationship is practically dead but neither of them wants to move on. Jesse is helping out Madame Pig, a grotesque recluse who keeps mentioning her “daughter” Madison to Jesse. Once Jesse meets Madison, she enters a world of prostitution and sex. To describe this as an odyssey would be accurate because this was quite the journey.
No character stands out as a favorite or someone as the least favorite because this felt like a little bit of a fever dream. I did sympathize with the main character at points because she’s leaving her twenties and coming to terms with her life. As someone who has done that recently, it’s both illuminating and alarming. Thinking about the first 30 years of my life; the relationships (or situationships), the mistakes, the time wasted… it’s eye-opening. While we may not relate in other areas, I got that.
I’ve never taken opium, nor do I intend to but I imagine that reading this book would be like being in a hazed-out opium den. There were times when I barely knew what was going on and it was a bit like a grunge Alice in Wonderland. I enjoyed how descriptive this book was and how real it felt. Steinke undressed this character Jesse in front of us. The only “weak” point is how aimless it feels in some parts. I believe what happening here but there are times when I question why I’m being told something.
There are some triggering parts of this book, particularly the last couple of pages because of a descriptive suicide. This book is moody and melancholy but in an oddly comforting way.
January 28, 2010
Suicide Blonde is an anti-love story, as its two protagonists (brittle "good girl", Jesse, who's never really been all that good, and weary, would-be actor, Bell, who can't stop performing) undergo the maudlin process of breaking up. The result is a woozy tale of dissolute characters having sex and trying to ease their misery in the fractured, contradictory city of San Francisco.
With its lyrical writing, casual bisexuality and gritty situations, this book feels like it was written for me. Or my 17-year-old self, anyway. A few years older/wiser, I must admit that, while Suicide Blonde's pretty package of misery is still appealing to me, I also recognize it as a wholly self-indulgent novel.
There's an inexplicable quality to the action. For instance, it's hard to believe that Jesse, who seems rootless as a ghost, would throw her lot in with beautiful, vicious Madison so readily. In fact, if anything, the novel reads like a bleak fantasy or dream sequence. It's hard to stay engaged with a narrative that is so meandering, and there were times, while reading, when I just got really tired of it.
With its unrelenting misery and whiff of pretension, some readers will undoubtedly find Suicide Blonde irritating. But, despite its flaws, I actually liked it a lot.
With its lyrical writing, casual bisexuality and gritty situations, this book feels like it was written for me. Or my 17-year-old self, anyway. A few years older/wiser, I must admit that, while Suicide Blonde's pretty package of misery is still appealing to me, I also recognize it as a wholly self-indulgent novel.
There's an inexplicable quality to the action. For instance, it's hard to believe that Jesse, who seems rootless as a ghost, would throw her lot in with beautiful, vicious Madison so readily. In fact, if anything, the novel reads like a bleak fantasy or dream sequence. It's hard to stay engaged with a narrative that is so meandering, and there were times, while reading, when I just got really tired of it.
With its unrelenting misery and whiff of pretension, some readers will undoubtedly find Suicide Blonde irritating. But, despite its flaws, I actually liked it a lot.
January 23, 2023
Fans of Anaïs Nin's
A Spy in the House of Love
will revel in this beautifully brooding book about a damaged young woman who finds herself adrift in San Francisco. Published at the height of the grunge era, Suicide Blonde vividly evokes imagery of grimy, smoke-filled rooms; neon-lit city streets littered with garbage; and abandoned, graffiti-plastered buildings. While Darcey Steinke creates a seductive atmosphere, she cheapens her novel with her over-eagerness to shock readers (a case in point: the book's off-putting opening sentence — “Was it the bourbon or the dye fumes that made the pink walls quiver like vaginal lips?”).
December 29, 2012
"Was it the bourbon or the dye fumes that made the pink walls quiver like vaginal lips?"
Two of my great friends live in San Fran and I know the lifestyle too well.
The pains over a bi-sexual boyfriend are menstrual, cutting, real. Fuck you, Bell. This stuff is great.
Madam Pig is real character.
Don't believe me? Read it.
Two of my great friends live in San Fran and I know the lifestyle too well.
The pains over a bi-sexual boyfriend are menstrual, cutting, real. Fuck you, Bell. This stuff is great.
Madam Pig is real character.
Don't believe me? Read it.
October 15, 2025
absolutely loved this book. her writing is BEAUTIFUL! she pulls the most perfectly bizarre metaphors with a magic precision. honestly no words for it… sexy prose meets esoteric girlish truth? i can’t wait to reread this again and again
“i remembered a day we'd walked to the pond with the swans in golden gate park, how he'd touched my hair as the birds rose and i looked up into his face.”
“i felt i knew what was best for me, but that somehow, because of a certain well-practiced falseness, a sort of stupid conventional programming, i couldn't do it. but was I right to undermine my life in an effort to right it?”
“i remembered a day we'd walked to the pond with the swans in golden gate park, how he'd touched my hair as the birds rose and i looked up into his face.”
“i felt i knew what was best for me, but that somehow, because of a certain well-practiced falseness, a sort of stupid conventional programming, i couldn't do it. but was I right to undermine my life in an effort to right it?”
September 11, 2021
3.5
VERY nineties - grimy, grungy, heroine-y - and also in the style of the writing, a slight remove? a coolness? great writing, but sometimes felt like a little bit of a slog to get through. would read more by Steinke though.
VERY nineties - grimy, grungy, heroine-y - and also in the style of the writing, a slight remove? a coolness? great writing, but sometimes felt like a little bit of a slog to get through. would read more by Steinke though.
December 10, 2021
(4.5)
This is what I hoped Lisa Taddeo’s Animal would be and it didn’t even come close.
Purely electrifying.
This is what I hoped Lisa Taddeo’s Animal would be and it didn’t even come close.
Purely electrifying.
November 4, 2024
Sensationalist bullshit.
February 17, 2025
suicide BLONDE💜
May 28, 2020
No Exit In Excess
Fashionable early Nineties nihilism. Courtney Love and Lou Reed channeling De Sade and Dostoevsky on the same Palahniukian typewriter. Notes from the velvet underground of a simpler time, an embarrassing artifact.
Fashionable early Nineties nihilism. Courtney Love and Lou Reed channeling De Sade and Dostoevsky on the same Palahniukian typewriter. Notes from the velvet underground of a simpler time, an embarrassing artifact.
April 20, 2023
I can hardly decide how to rate this book. This dilemma is my own fault for picking up an erotic literature and then whining about the abundance of sexual content, but the cover is too enticing to pass up.
None of the characters in this novel are in the right headspace. They are a bunch of flawed people with complicated views on life who obviously need serious counseling. When I say complicated, I mean someone who is addicted to indifference and longs to be with a homosexual partner or someone who wants to escape her own consciousness by being a self-destructive whore. It's so blunt that it slaps the reader in the face with the sad reality that some people are trapped in a well-developed sense of doom and believe they'll never escape the trauma in the bubble they're in. There's way too much brooding and chaos going on, and IT'S DAMN DEVASTATING.
After some drastic and life-destroying actions, there's this line: 'I have done the thing I was most afraid of.. what will happen now?' for a little while, it fills my existence with emptiness and triggers memories of my own self-inflicted suffering.
There's a strong feminist approach to it, but in a very sensual way, so it takes a lot of patience not to cringe internally with all the weird sex thing.
I hope when you read this, you look at it closely enough because it can be easily misread. There's beauty in the shattered bits of these broken people and I won't forget how it made me feel.
None of the characters in this novel are in the right headspace. They are a bunch of flawed people with complicated views on life who obviously need serious counseling. When I say complicated, I mean someone who is addicted to indifference and longs to be with a homosexual partner or someone who wants to escape her own consciousness by being a self-destructive whore. It's so blunt that it slaps the reader in the face with the sad reality that some people are trapped in a well-developed sense of doom and believe they'll never escape the trauma in the bubble they're in. There's way too much brooding and chaos going on, and IT'S DAMN DEVASTATING.
After some drastic and life-destroying actions, there's this line: 'I have done the thing I was most afraid of.. what will happen now?' for a little while, it fills my existence with emptiness and triggers memories of my own self-inflicted suffering.
There's a strong feminist approach to it, but in a very sensual way, so it takes a lot of patience not to cringe internally with all the weird sex thing.
I hope when you read this, you look at it closely enough because it can be easily misread. There's beauty in the shattered bits of these broken people and I won't forget how it made me feel.
November 23, 2012
Steinke's writing reminds me of a more accessible Kathy Acker. It's like an Eyes Wide Shut-type surreal fantasy — overtly sexual, dark, obscure, largely pointless. If you don't like to read books that make you feel uncomfortable, you won't enjoy it. But I liked Suicide Blonde, and appreciated Steinke's commentary on human nature. Steinke writes beautiful, and occasionally I would find sentences or passages that I absolutely loved and wanted to read over and over.
Interesting enough, I didn't particularly like the heroine, Jesse, but I rooted for her. Maybe it was just that she reminded me a bit of myself; through the novel, she tries to get to that pinnacle of "modern feminist woman" but gets lost by her own personal failures and apathy. The characters in Suicide Blonde are obnoxious, sadistic, bizarre, and hedonistic. In other words, they are like most people.
My one major dislike was that the book largely seems to be trying to to somewhere, but never quite gets there. The book doesn't end abruptly, but I did get the feeling that the book wasn't over when it had ended. The book's very Nihilistic, there really is not much of a point to it. Overall, it's a fast read (it took me a day), and if you're paying attention, you can get a lot out of it.
Interesting enough, I didn't particularly like the heroine, Jesse, but I rooted for her. Maybe it was just that she reminded me a bit of myself; through the novel, she tries to get to that pinnacle of "modern feminist woman" but gets lost by her own personal failures and apathy. The characters in Suicide Blonde are obnoxious, sadistic, bizarre, and hedonistic. In other words, they are like most people.
My one major dislike was that the book largely seems to be trying to to somewhere, but never quite gets there. The book doesn't end abruptly, but I did get the feeling that the book wasn't over when it had ended. The book's very Nihilistic, there really is not much of a point to it. Overall, it's a fast read (it took me a day), and if you're paying attention, you can get a lot out of it.
April 23, 2025
At times I thought the protagonist concieted. But I think this was the point. The way she drifts through other's lives, has a taste, and ultimately leaves, to me emphasises that she will never be those people. Be it a privilege or a curse; as one of the characters says at the end, she does not know where others end and she begins.
The author writes beautifully. But the read remains melancholic and nihilistic. Despite this this I enjoyed the musings of the protagonist and psychoanalysis of those around her. The character development really centers on her realising the root of others insecurities and thus her own.
I don't think the author ever intended for the protagonist to be good. But she also seems to have a lot of trauma. Similarly to those around her. Hence the abrupt passages detailing experiences, triggered by seemingly inconsequential acts ie. Vacuuming. All the characters are flawed and dislikable.
The author writes beautifully. But the read remains melancholic and nihilistic. Despite this this I enjoyed the musings of the protagonist and psychoanalysis of those around her. The character development really centers on her realising the root of others insecurities and thus her own.
I don't think the author ever intended for the protagonist to be good. But she also seems to have a lot of trauma. Similarly to those around her. Hence the abrupt passages detailing experiences, triggered by seemingly inconsequential acts ie. Vacuuming. All the characters are flawed and dislikable.
August 20, 2007
My wife read this book and told me it was disturbing. She also told me that it reminded me of the two years she lived in San Francisco (where the story takes place); that disturbed me.
Right off the bat, I began reading this book for most of the wrong reasons.
This book is not well written and thinks itself much "cooler" than it actually is. The story a bit over the top in it's attempt to be the cool, sad tale of a young woman's ongoing train wreck of a life.
In retrospect, as I've gotten older, observing other people's unrelenting fuck-ups and corrosive and harmful lifestyles isn't quite as thrilling as it once was.
Right off the bat, I began reading this book for most of the wrong reasons.
This book is not well written and thinks itself much "cooler" than it actually is. The story a bit over the top in it's attempt to be the cool, sad tale of a young woman's ongoing train wreck of a life.
In retrospect, as I've gotten older, observing other people's unrelenting fuck-ups and corrosive and harmful lifestyles isn't quite as thrilling as it once was.
April 22, 2023
an ehhh book imo
pros: set in SF in the 90s & actually feels like it, very vivid, short & snappy
cons: everything else
got a bonus star bc, “I decided that all this was my fault because I was the worst kind of person; a pretty girl with high expectations who wanted more, but couldn't define more and prayed it wasn't just a matter of marrying money.” is perhaps the cruelest & most honest thing i’ve ever heard.
pros: set in SF in the 90s & actually feels like it, very vivid, short & snappy
cons: everything else
got a bonus star bc, “I decided that all this was my fault because I was the worst kind of person; a pretty girl with high expectations who wanted more, but couldn't define more and prayed it wasn't just a matter of marrying money.” is perhaps the cruelest & most honest thing i’ve ever heard.
February 4, 2018
Read it so you can say you did and then we'll talk about it. It's the only way to read Darcey Steinke's novel that makes you see "wine drunk" and young adulthood in a new way.
What's the point of it? I don't know, you tell me.
What's the point of it? I don't know, you tell me.
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