Zipper Mouth
A Novel
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
This novel of a young lesbian addict in ’90s NYC “recalls Naked Lunch” with “dreamy, impressionistic, and rapturous” prose—“an ecstatic love story” (Publishers Weekly).
Written in the brash, fervent voice of the young and addicted, this debut novel from underground superstar Laurie Weeks “is a short tome of infinitesimal reach, a tiny star to light the land” (Eileen Myles).
Strung out on dope and unrequited love for her straight best friend, Jane, the novel’s unnamed narrator zig-zags between glimpses of her childhood and early teens to the raw, super-caffeinated world of her present on the streets of New York. Chosen by Dave Eggers as Best American Nonrequired Reading and a winner of the 2012 Lambda Literary Awards, this novel encapsulates the soaring highs and gritty lows of the junkie and the reckless intensity of love. “The book’s pulse is evident on every page.” (Lambda Literary)
“Zipper Mouth is a brilliant rabbit hole of pitch-black hilarity, undead obsession, the horror of the everyday, and drug, drugs, drugs.” —Michelle Tea, co-founder of SisterSpit
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Weeks's brash, exuberant debut traces a young lesbian woman's tortured, drug-addled, unrequited crush while living in New York City in edgier times. Hailing from a small farming community in the Midwest where she rejected the prevailing passions of "hunting and vacuuming," the narrator, the daughter of an alcoholic father ("a drunken pork sausage") who eventually died a violent death, gravitated to New York in her 20s, stumbled into odd jobs, heroin, and cocaine, and fell hopelessly in love with Jane, a savvy performance artist who happens to be straight despite her ambiguous come-ons. This keeps the narrator in a feverish state of "fascinating and seductive interiority"; she's drugged up, out of work, and obsessing, as her letter to actress Judy Davis clearly shows: "Though you look so calm and composed in your films, Judy, I suspect this to be a well-rehearsed defense mechanism." The narrator is wracked by anxieties and is at home in the toxic landscape of 1980s lower Manhattan; drugs and alcohol both calm and stimulate her, lending the prose a psychotic compression that recalls Naked Lunch and imparts a fresh, lyrical sympathy to Week's narrator. Dreamy, impressionistic, and rapturous, this brief volume is an ecstatic love story.
