Tag Archives: memoirs

Danika reviews Drawing Love by Juli Jousan

Posted on by

Drawing Love by Juli Jousan treads a fine line. It could easily seem overwrought or juvenile. Drawing Love alternates between the present and a description of the main character, Mo, having a dramatic high school relationship. By relating that in flash backs, and showing that Mo has moved on and grown up since then, it avoids being completely mired in the drama of the situation. Throughout the book are Mo’s drawings, which I don’t really feel comfortable commenting on, because I don’t really know enough about art to critique it. They are mostly line drawings.

Some of the writing, like the dialogue between Mo and her mother, seems a little stilted, but it manages to avoid that most of the time. Drawing Love offers a brief glimpse into a life, mostly showing a college relationship with the flash backs to provide context. There are lots of drawings, large font, and wide spacing throughout the novel, making it an easy 2 hour read.

Danika reviews Are You My Mother? by Alison Bechdel

Posted on by

I’m going to be honest, I have no idea how to review this book. I loved Bechdel’s first comic memoir, Fun Home, so I was very excited to pick up Are You My Mother? And it definitely does have some of the best elements from Fun Home: the writing is amazing, the art is beautiful, and the entire book is intricate and complex. I feel like I’d have to read this at least four times before I can really feel like I “get it” at all.

Where Fun Home used the family house as a framing device for the story, Are You My Mother? relies on psychoanalysis, dream analysis specifically. Fun Home also had literature references throughout, and Are You My Mother? does reference Virginia Woolf several times, but most of the books mentioned are psychoanalysis books. It also revolves around Bechdel’s visits with her psychiatrist(s). (This is, of course, not to mention the central theme of her relationship with her mother.)

Bechdel’s relationship with her mother is more complex than her relationship with her father, partly because they can’t just be compared based on sexuality or gender roles, and partly because Bechdel’s mother is still alive, and resists being rewritten into one narrative.

I didn’t enjoy Are You My Mother? quite as much as Fun Home because a lot of the psychoanalysis went over my head, and I enjoyed the literature references in Fun Home more than the dream analysis in Are You My Mother? That isn’t to say the Are You My Mother? isn’t fantastic, however, and I expect that I will enjoy it more after a few re-reads.

Danika re-reviews Fun Home by Alison Bechdel

Posted on by

Fun Home is one my favourite books, so I was happy for the chance to re-read it in one of my English classes this semester. It definitely, definitely stands up to a second reading. In fact, I plan on writing my final essay about it, because there’s just so much to it.

There’s the obvious interesting autobiography element, and the strength of the illustrations, and the parallel between Bechdel and her father, but I had forgotten that it’s also a deeply literary work.

If there’s anything I like more than lesbians or books, it’s lesbian books. And if there’s anything I like more than lesbian books, it’s books about lesbian books. Fun Home is the perfect mix of these interests. Bechdel’s parents as she was growing up were both English teachers, and books are a constant presence throughout the novel. She understands her family through comparing them to books and authors. She often has excerpts from books that take up a whole panel, and even the books in the background usually get a title and author.

Most of the references I didn’t fully understand, because I’m not particularly familiar with the Western canon. I’m sure, though, that Fun Home would be even richer if you are.

Bechdel’s coming out was also wrapped in books: she realized her lesbianism by stumbling across a description of a lesbian in a book, she devoured lesbian books in her coming out process, and she parallels her coming out with the Odyssey.

Fun Home also has an interesting, twisting narrative structure. We leap forward and backward in time, but it never feels forced.

All in all, I had remembered how enjoyable Fun Home was, but I don’t think I remembered how fascinating it is, and how much depth there is to it. I can’t wait to read Bechdel’s upcoming graphic memoir, Are You My Mother?

Danika reviews The Gifted Ones by Lisa Vaughn

Posted on by

I think I might be a little burnt out on self-published books.

The problem is that I always have the same problems with them, and almost all of those problems can be summed up with “not enough editing.” The Gifted Ones (a memoir), unfortunately, fits in that category. The typos are numerous, including two ones that I noticed repeating. The first is mistaking “of” for “have” (“should of” “could of” “Wouldn’t Peggy of been proud?” (pg 171)), and the second was “towing the line.” There was also a lot of unnecessary emphasis (lots of bolding, underlining, italics, all caps).

I don’t want to say it was all bad, however. I really think it has potential. I found the childhood part slow, but the story after that is compelling.

I think I might be able to be a little more coherent in point form.

Positives:

  • I really think there is enough action for a novel-length story. Everyone thinks their life story is interesting, but not everyone actually has enough happen to fill a whole book.
  • I loved the budding romance. It seemed very natural. I also thought the first kiss was memorable. The scene was striking.
  • [spoilers] I was impressed that Vaughn gave her romance with Selina the weight she did, considering it one of the two true loves of her life, not just a passing fling on the way to heterosexualville. I really appreciated that. [end spoilers] 

Negatives

  • It’s a lot like reading a diary, but without the immediacy. I really would have liked to see a little more of a critical eye instead of just detailing what happened, how she felt at the time, and the occasional speculation.
  • A lot of things are over-explained (but that’s my pet peeve in books, so it may just be me).
  • Swearing in dialogue between teens makes perfect sense, but having it in the narration was odd. Again, it’s somewhere between being a first-person, in-the-moment account and a more reflective account with the knowledge gained over time. It don’t quite achieve either, which makes it awkward.
  • The word “retard” is used, again, not just in dialogue, which is understandable in the 70s, but uncritically in the narration, which really made me cringe. It happens more than once.
  • There is some heavy-handed foreshadowing (something like “But we had no idea how bad it would get!” at the end of a chapter).
  • Her childhood, which was pretty typical, got a lot of space and detail, but [spoilers] her engagement and marriage was summed up in a few paragraphs tacked on to the end. [end spoilers] There didn’t seem to be a coherent conclusion, which made me wonder what the focus of the memoir was.

Oddly, I think if this had simply been her diaries from the time, I probably would have enjoyed it more, because I love reading diaries and journals, but it wasn’t quite as immediate as that, or as critical as I would like out of a memoir.

Overall, Vaughn’s romance is compelling, and her later partying lifestyle–as well as dealing with anti-gay bigotry in the 70s and 80s–is more than enough material to form a great story, but The Gifted Ones just needed far more editing to achieve that, including paring it down so that it had a clear goal.

Holly reviews Dear John, I Love Jane edited by Candace Walsh and Laura André

Posted on by

Dear John, I Love Jane: Women Write about Leaving Men for Women, edited by Candace Walsh and Laura André and published by Seal Press, is a collection of personal essays about women who discover they’re lesbian/ bi/ queer/ otherwise in love with a woman a little later in life. For some, this means coming out to their families and friends in their middle or old age. Others learn (or change) in their twenties and thirties, which may not seem that late but can feel as though it is.

I connected with some of these stories. For instance, having to leave the country to start getting it on sounds all too familiar, writing folksy songs for one’s honey is cute, and dreaming of Angelina Jolie’s lips might just be my favorite Sapphic rite of passage.

Other narratives I found annoying. Occasionally, the dialogue seemed stilted. A couple of the first girlfriends made me want to tell the respective writers “Don’t fuck that girl. Get her a therapist.” Plus, some of the coming-out-of-the-closet-y language made me uncomfortable. There is only so much of “I didn’t want to look like a dyke”-esque sentiment that I can stand without becoming defensive.

Nevertheless, I was so grateful to be let into these women’s lives. Fluid in topic and in form, their secrets transformed into whole stories, big tell-alls that were very comforting and sexy. (Yet, it was not so lush that I wouldn’t lend it to my friends and family.) Even as a fairly young and out queer, I found Dear John, I Love Jane accessible and cathartic. This is a book I plan to keep and reread over the years. I recommend it to anyone wanting to understand the sometimes hazy pop phrase “fluid sexuality.”

Danika reviews Butch is a Noun by S. Bear Bergman

Posted on by

I feel the need to start off by saying: I loved this book. I only keep books that I plan on re-reading, and this one is firmly in the permanent collection. It also an example of why I really try to keep the definition of which books are included in the Lesbrary as open as possible, because I really want to be able to review books like this, which are not just “lesbian” or “bisexual woman” or always “woman” and butch/femme identity is an overlap between sexuality and gender. (On a sidenote, the identities of “butch” and “lesbian” were once problematically merged under the term of “invert”, such as in Well of Loneliness.) This clip of Bergman reading “I Know What Butch Is” (included in this collection) clarifies. [Trigger warning for trans slur]

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qv89wbZHzNQ]

Overall, I loved the writing (though I thought some of the extended metaphors were a little too extended). It’s easy to read and casual. It remind me of Ivan E. Coyote, one of my favourite authors, although obviously in this collection the writings are all about butch identity, where they are more of a undertone in Coyote’s. It has serious and funny parts, personal and general points, and is extremely personal and honest. The writing tries to be inclusive of all butches (as you can see in the clip).

One that stood out for me was “Stick and Stones Will Break My Bones, But Words Will Kill Me”, in which Bergman appears to have quoted some of the things said to hir about hir butch identity. The sentiments are painful just to read, and Bergman leaves you to take them in without hir commentary.

You won’t necessarily agree with everything Bergman says, but ze raises some really interesting questions and observations. Butch is a Noun is a fascinating butch manifesto and a brilliant and timely re-examination of masculinity. Highly recommended.

Guest Lesbrarian Rie reviews The Chelsea Whistle

Posted on by

Previous to reading The Chelsea Whistle, I’d attempted a memoir by a smothered-but-privileged writer. This history of Tea’s youth soared where that failed.

It’s all those adjectives given to books that end up written by a mom in the midwest–raw, gritty, real, hopeful–but this one’s real. It’s the brutality of childhood that we all experience, the confusion of adolescence, the disillusionment of young adulthood. It’s climbing into a forbidden creek and seeking validation from a psychic teahouse in Boston, neon costumes and pop-punk anthems that give you a glimpse of a world beyond Chelsea, a string of loser boyfriends before convincing yourself that you’ve fallen in love with the most beautiful flapper-girl-artist ever, a bad high at the first Lollapalooza, rejecting and then uniting with your sister over shared abuse. The end has been construed as depressing by some, but it’s not, when you realize this is only the beginning of her life in print. (It continues with The Passionate Mistakes and Intricate Corruption of One Girl in America, Rent Girl,  and Valencia).

So beautiful and ugly that it hurts, Tea’s memoir is for those who want a true slice of life, a coming-of-age of a queer feminist force of nature.

Thanks, Rie! You can find more of her reviews at friendofdorothywilde.blogspot.com!

Guest Lesbrarian Orange Sorbet reviews Unbearable Lightness by Portia De Rossi

Posted on by

I thought Teri Hatcher’s Burnt Toast: And Other Philosophies of Life had poisoned celebrity autobiographies for me forever, but when I first heard of Portia’s Unbearable Lightness: A Story of Loss and Gain, I knew I had to get it. (This may or may not have had to do with how cute I think she is.) I had simultaneously high and low hopes for this book — high because of all the hype surrounding it, which I suppose is only natural when the author’s one half of the most famous lesbian couple and probably on Oprah’s speed-dial; and low because this still is a book written by an unproven author, after all.

In Unbearable Lightness, Portia details her struggles with eating disorders and her sexuality. As mentioned in her interviews, she wrote it from the “perspective of a sick person” and so most of the book tracks her intense obsession with weight loss and increasingly extreme behaviour until she reaches an all-time low of 82 pounds (about 37kg).

I decided not to eat the egg whites. I didn’t need them. As they slid off the plate and into the trash, I felt a surge of adrenaline. I felt invincible, powerful. Not eating them was incredibly difficult and by not eating them I had just proven to myself that I was stronger than my basic instincts, that I could deny them. I wouldn’t give in to the desire to eat, because after all, isn’t that what fat people do? They give in to desire? They know they shouldn’t eat the brownie, but they just can’t help themselves.

What immediately struck me was how readable the memoir was. When writing about mental illnesses in particular, I believe, authors have to work doubly hard to have their readers empathise with being in a position most people aren’t usually sympathetic to while at the same time avoid writing a piece that is excessively intense or triggering. Let’s put it this way: when dealing with someone with depression, people instinctively think, “Why can’t you just be happy? It’s not that hard.” Portia deftly brings her readers into the mindset of an anorexic/bulimic without overwhelming them, and the overall effect is that you get a story about a life you will never experience — and never hope to — but with a person in the middle of it whose battles you can strongly relate to.

As Portia’s weight steadily decreases, the narrative alternates between her life in Hollywood (particularly on the set of Ally McBeal, the show which catapulted her to fame) and her childhood in Australia. She tells the story of how a desperate desire to constantly remake herself pushed her to change her name on a whim at age 15 — Portia de Rossi was actually born Amanda Lee Rogers — and to ditch her “perfectly worn black leather engineers’ boots” in favour of more feminine Capri pants and high heels years later as she faced celebrity-dom.

The story of her sexuality, or more specifically, her quest to hide and/or deny it, is interwoven with her life with EDs. While I did find that this issue sometimes felt forced and didn’t quite gel with the rest of the narrative, I don’t think the memoir would be complete without it because there is no doubt in my mind that having to hide such a big part of yourself would have an incredibly destructive effect on your sense of self, leaving you particularly vulnerable to things like EDs. Also, it leaves for some pretty brilliant I-like-other-girls-but-I’m-not-a-lesbian anecdotes, and there’s of course the beautiful irony that she constantly looked to Ellen DeGeneres as an example of why she couldn’t afford to come out as a lesbian and… well.

My girlfriend had to be heterosexual because I didn’t want to be a lesbian. If she was heterosexual, then it suggested that I was also heterosexual. Also, I was scared of lesbians. In fact, I would cross the street if I saw one coming toward me. One time I didn’t cross the street and I ended up sleeping with a lesbian because I felt sorry for her. She had just lost her girlfriend in a car accident and I was devastated for her. Nothing sounded worse to me than losing your girlfriend; that the one precious connection that you had made in your whole life was gone, wasted, lost in a car wreck. It sounded so much worse to me than a wife losing her husband — it was worse than anything. I found this woman to be quite unattractive. She was overweight and had a shaved head and facial piercings. But I had to sleep with her. It was only polite.

N.B. I would like to know exactly how she identifies those lesbians coming down the street, because I really suck at that. And while it does sound like Portia may have been conned into believing a sob story so that aforementioned lesbian could get into her pants, Ellen actually had a girlfriend who died in a car accident when she was 21.

The only gripe I have about the book is that at the end of it, I still felt there were a fair number of loose ends that needed to be tied up. She mentions her father quite a bit both in the book and her interviews and it is evident that his death when she was a child severely impacted her (naturally), but I don’t know what kind of father he was or what their relationship was like. (In contrast, I found the portrayal of her mother as a figure of many contradictions — nurturing but pressurising, caring but also careless — amazingly realistic.) This might be a minor point but I would also have liked to know more about Bean, her dog who was her sole companion for many years. Most significantly, the book is a lot more about “loss” than it is about “gain,” and there is very little about her recovery.

To be frank, if it weren’t for Portia’s name and fame — or perhaps more accurately, Ellen’s — this (audio)book would not be #1 on iTunes. It probably wouldn’t hit any bestsellers list; it is not particularly insightful, clever, or even especially original. It is honest, though, and it is that refreshing straightforwardness that kept me turning the pages. I wouldn’t go out of my way to recommend this book, but it’s definitely worth a read.

Thank you so much for the review, Orange Sorbet! You can find Orange Sorbet’s blog here, and the original post of this review (complete with adorable pictures of Portia) here.

If you’d like to submit a guest lesbrarian review to the Lesbrary, click here!

Laura Mandanas reviews Pink Steam by Dodie Bellamy

Posted on by

Pink Steam by Dodie Bellamy is a cross-genre collection of prose written over two decades. Contradictorily classified as fiction/essay/memoir, the 22 pieces are arranged into what the author has described as “a fractured autobiography in which the culture I live in is as much my autobiography as are the ‘facts’ of my life.” For her, there is no self separate from culture.

Indeed, throughout much of the book, the only sure “facts” I knew came as I sorted through the scattered debris of pop culture tidbits. (Yes! Carrie did wreak havoc at the prom with her telekinesis. No! Rosemary did not birth a son too pure for the devil to possess.) As for the arcane autobiographical details, no matter how many notes I scribbled in the margins, full understanding was tantalizingly juuuust out of reach. (Why did the protagonist suddenly begin calling herself Carla? It’s because of the demon fucking, right? Or is it the memory of the abortion? Are you taunting me on purpose, Bellamy?)

Ordered semi-chronologically, the essays begin in the early ’60s. Young Dodie is in a furtive relationship with Nance, her best friend who lives down the street. Writes Bellamy, “In the industrial Midwest of my youth, strong lines were drawn between inside/outside, normal/abnormal, natural/freak – and those lines were brutally enforced. In high school I was a lesbian, i.e., on the wrong side of all those slashes.”

Things do not stay this way for long. To placate her mother, with the summer of ’74 comes Dodie’s decision to be straight — a self-declared categorization that seems to hold for the book’s remaining essays. At the same time, she is never hesitant to describe her unfulfilled longing for women, in a manner reminiscent of Quasimodo’s longing for Gina Lollobrigida in the 1956 The Hunchback of Notre Dame (a theme tenuously threaded throughout the book). So, who knows. Who cares? There’s a little somethin’ somethin’ for everyone in this book; let’s just leave it at that.

Bellamy’s prose is a gorgeous, sometimes nonsensical tidal wave of words. The text is flooded with grocery lists and song lyrics and imagined film scripts and fantasy and horror and science fiction and poetry all at once, mid-narrative. Though I usually shy away from experimental bullshit, as a reader, I was swept away by book’s fabulously imaginative approaches, drawn in by its shifting undulations of tense and perspective.

Basically, this book is awesome.

In “Sex/Body/Writing”, Bellamy writes: “I’m working toward a writing that subverts sexual bragging, a writing that champions the vulnerable, the fractured, the disenfranchised, the sexually fucked-up.” As far as I’m concerned? She’s there. She’s got it. She’s flaunting it. And I absolutely love it.

Pink Steam seems to be out of print, but if you do a little hunting around you should be able to find it. Enjoy.

Kelly reviews Inferno by Eileen Myles

Posted on by

Inferno: A Poet’s Novel, Eileen Myles

If the flight from Minneapolis to Vancouver had been just a little longer, I would have finished this book in one sit. Not because of the plot—basically nonexistent—but because of the feeling, thought, feeling. Plus, the hot and sometimes hilarious sex, of course.

Though subtitled “A Poet’s Novel,” this piece is only vaguely fictional, referring to real figures from Myles’ life and incorporating previously published poems. Myles brings a poet’s precision to this semi-fiction, semi-memoir. Take these opening lines:

My English professor’s ass was so beautiful. It was perfect and full as she stood at the board writing some important word. Reality or perhaps illusion. She opened the door. With each movement of her arms and her hand delicately but forcefully inscribing the letters intended for our eyes her ass shook ever so slightly. I had never learned from a woman with a body before. Something slow, horrible and glowing was happening inside me. I stood on the foothills to heaven. She opened the door.

After introducing Dante to the class, this English professor asks students to write their own infernos. The class groans. Eileen writes hers alone at the kitchen table at home. Her professor’s public response to Eileen’s poem makes her wonder, could this poetry gig be a job? There is little plot in the book, but that is not the point. When I heard Myles speak in Vancouver, she said she wrote this book to explain being a poet. It is a thorough and provoking explanation.

In many ways, this book has nothing to do with the original Divine Comedy. Dante’s judicial nature and firm vengeance are absent; Myles is not teaching us how to be good; and other than a dose of guilt, there’s nothing Catholic about this piece. However, like Dante, Myles is a poet on a journey, through a spectacular and sometimes grotesque universe; and though there is no single Beatrice, it is women who bring Myles through. Her discovery of her sexuality is written in glorious detail: the awkwardness and the joy resonate equally.