My Lesbian Novel
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
The latest in writer and visual artist Renee Gladman’s ever-expanding body of imaginative investigation is a sui generis novel of queerness and art-making, philosophy and sex.
The narrator of My Lesbian Novel is Renee Gladman, an artist and writer who has produced the same acclaimed body of experimental art and prose as real-life Renee Gladman, and who is now being interviewed by an unnamed interlocutor about a project in process, a seeming departure from her other works, a lesbian romance.
Between reflections on art making and on the genre of lesbian romance—“though aspects of the formula drive me crazy . . . people who write these stories understand how beautiful women are”—a romance novel of her own takes shape on the page, written alongside the interview, which sometimes skips whole years between questions, so that time and aging become part of the process.
The result is a beautifully orchestrated dialogue between reflection and desire, or clarity and confusion, between the pleasures of form and the pleasures of freedom in the unspooling of sentences over time.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The scintillating and unclassifiable latest from Gladman (Houses of Ravicka) takes the form of an interview with a writer named Renee Gladman about her attempt to write a lesbian romance. The conversation, which takes place over several years with an unnamed artist, includes reflections on the lesbian romance genre, of which Gladman considers herself a "scholar" after reading hundreds of them ("I learned how much people who are not writing experimental novels have their characters eat pizza and watch TV. It was like getting a tour through a kind of living that had eluded me before"). Interspersed with the dialogue are excerpts from Renee's lesbian romance in progress, which stars a New York City architect named June who becomes reacquainted with a woman named Thena and can't remember what happened between them in the past. Taken together, the conversations and the novel in progress reflect Renee's desire to both fulfill and subvert expectations of the romance genre. Readers of Gladman's previous work will recognize her brilliant thinking and penchant for challenging experiments, though this is her most accessible book yet. She sketches a stimulating portrait of a writer and her process while provoking readers to look closely at works of literature and identify the "book within a book within a third book that's practically invisible." It's a knockout.
