Literary Lesbians

FEBRUARY
The Catch by Marg Vandeleur
A book by one of our very own Literary Lesbians! Theatrical agent Letty Summers wants a baby. The catch? Her partner has dumped her. The single scene is leaving her cold. Then Robert Darling arrives. Unattached, gay, gorgeous and a knitter, he’s everything she’s looking for. Heart-warming and hilarious, The Catch takes us into an upside-down world where lesbians know the most men, comedians can’t laugh and a man with hobbies is exotic.

MARCH
The Danish Girl by David Ebershoff
Follows the lives of an attractive bohemian couple and the impact on their relationship when the young husband follows his inclinations to become a woman. They stay together and from then on appear to be a lesbian couple. (Nicole Kidman to play the role of transitioning husband in film version).

APRIL
The Red Thread by Nicholas Jose
The Red Thread takes one of China’s most cherished tales and turns it into a novel of desire and destiny. Shen is a young appraiser for an auction house in glittering, turbulent present-day Shanghai. Ruth is an Australian artist he meets, it seems, by chance. And Han is a beautiful, enigmatic woman who complicates their relationship. Their lives mysteriously mirror the characters in an old book, Six Chapters of a Floating Life – a book missing its ending. Shen’s search for those lost chapters moves from curiosity to desperation as he realises that the fate of the lovers depends upon it.

MAY
Annie on my Mind by Nancy Garden
Published in 1982, Annie On My Mind was an anomaly in children's literature. With few children's and teen books addressing homosexuality, the story of Liza and Annie, of course, encountered many opponents, due to its "alternative lifestyle" plotline. Number 48 on the ALA Most Challenged Book list, the narrative addresses two teen lesbians, as well as the social repercussions of such a relationship. The book is never gratuitous, and portrays the couple tenderly, but still comes under fire. Literally. In 1993, Kansas City witnessed a public burning of the novel. The following year, ironically, brought a public performance of the novel in another Kansas town.

JUNE
Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
"I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974."So begins Jeffrey Eugenides' second novel, Middlesex, the story of Calliope Stephanides, who discovers at the age of fourteen that she is really a he. Cal traces the story of his transformation and the genetic condition that caused it back to his paternal grandparents, who happen also to be brother and sister, and the Greek village of Bithynios in Asia Minor. Middlesex is a story about what it means to occupy the complex and unnamed middle ground between male and female, Greek and American, past and present. For Cal, caught between these identities, the journey to adulthood is particularly fraught. Jeffrey Eugenides' epic portrayal of Cal's struggle is classical in its structure and scope and contemporary in its content; a tender and honest examination of a battle that is increasingly relevant to us all.

JULY
Diary of a Provincial Lesbian by VG Lee
Romance and belly laughs from a storyteller with an eye and ear for reporting the contemporary lesbian life in rural England. This terrific writer brings alive various eccentric English characters who live outside London. Queer is obviously alive and well out there, and this writer is very funny and will have you laughing and crying.

AUGUST
Jane Bond: Kiss the Girls and Make them Spy by Mabel Maney
Mabel Maney's giddy and outrageous spoof of the Bond books ousts the main character himself. As her story opens, James has been locked away in a Swiss sanitarium, having at last "lost his nerve." The British Secret Service plots to recruit his bookish, unambitious lesbian twin sister, Jane, hoping that in disguise, she will be a convincing stand-in for the world-famous agent. Although thrilled by the tailored suit the government provides, Jane is a reluctant spy. What she doesn't know is that her new girlfriend, Bridget, ostensibly a cosmetic sales girl, is in fact a feminist counterspy struggling to foil a fascist scheme to put the aging Duke and Duchess of Windsor on the throne. Will Bridget misplace her top-secret cipher panties in a moment of passion? Can Jane avoid being killed for England? Can she keep the suit? With her usual flair for period detail, Maney paints a vivid, irreverent picture of the Bond era and spoofs Fleming's lingering romance with Empire.

SEPTEMBER
Strange Museums: A Journey Through Poland by Fiona McGregor
Strange Museums is McGregor’s idiosyncratic account of her journey, offering reflections on politics, culture, history and sexuality. With a novelist’s eye for detail, McGregor reveals the geographic and historical centre of Europe in all its contemporary contradiction. This is a candid and unusual take on travel writing.

OCTOBER
In Search of the Missing Eyelash by Karen McLeod
Cracker of an opening line in Karen McLeod's debut: "I woke up in a foreign armpit." That pretty much sums up the dry, deadpan, intriguing style of this novel, which manages to combine sitcom-style farce with movingly understated heartache. The waker-upper in question is Lizzie, a south London woman in her 20s. The armpit belongs to a girl she winked at in the club the night before, and although Lizzie can't remember quite why she winked in the first place, she feels triumphant: "Out of all the girls in the club, the stranger had picked me." You begin to understand how much it means to her when her story comes out. Lizzie is a serial abandonee: her brother Simon has disappeared, her mother's house is inexplicably empty and her ex-girlfriend, Sally - the recent recipient of all Lizzie's frustrated affection - has left her for a fat-necked man. There is also another betrayal, deeper in the past, so painful that Lizzie can only hint at its nature.

NOVEMBER
The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula Le Guin
One of the interesting pieces of Ursula K. Le Guin's "The Left Hand of Darkness" is the lack of gender in the alien society of Winter. Le Guin holds a thought experiment, to see what happens when society does not have male or a female, where its inhabitants are only interested in sex for a small part of the year. In the far future a new Utopian society has risen up. With the federation of Eukemen came peace for all the planets that joined them. The only problem is that not all planets have joined or even know of the Eukemen. Genly Ai, an agent for the Eukemen, is sent to Winter, one of the non-federated planets, to see if he can persuade the inhabitants to join. However he soon finds that the rulers of Winter do not like the idea of being part of a federation, because it might cost them some of their own personal power. Genly Ai is forced to become a fugitive until, by using shifrethgor, the honor system of the Eukemen, he is able to trick the king of one of Winter's nations into accepting the federation.

DECEMBER
Dish it Up Baby by Kristie Helms
"Dish It Up, Baby" is Kristie Helms' first novel which serves up some varied slices of life, tracing her twenty-something heroine through childhood in rural Kentucky to her first job in Manhattan, and finally to Boston as she searches for true love, a cubicle near the window and the perfect shade of lipstick. A cross between "Bastard Out of Carolina" and "Bridget Jones' Diary," the novel explodes stereotypes about Appalachia and offers a hilarious look at the work-a-day world of the Northeast through the eyes of its plucky heroine.

2010
Sputnik Sweetheart by Haruki Murakami
Sumire, the 22 year old sexually confused, putative writer is being tempted by the lure of a different life. She is developing new sensual feelings for an older woman of 38, Miu. A simple tale told well. Haruki Murakami is master of creating sexually enigmatic and frustrated characters who seek happiness...but only with people who cannot reciprocate. His world is full of people going through the motions of a life, deeply passionate about music, literature or art, yet somehow never able to feel the same way about fellow humans.

This month’s dinner was attended by Ange, Sam, Kat, Marj, Julie, Jude, Nicole, Marg, Anna, and Bridge and Magda made a late appearance.

Kat started the discussion by saying that the wacky bits at the start and end of the book nearly did her head in, and “maybe I needed to be stoned” to get it.

Ange really liked the running narrative, but Marg thought that the switch of narrator throughout the book was confusing. Nicole liked the way the author characterised each chapter by “us”, “me”, “them”, etc.

Julie was annoyed that the sister in the book had so much voice and felt that it was like we needed a hetero perspective to validate the lesbian relationship. The main character, Anthea, was not as distinctively a character as her sister. We were allowed into the sister’s head, and not Anthea’s. The sister also changed throughout the book, and so essentially we felt that it was her story. We discussed whether or not it mattered that effectively the sister was the main character. Marj and Julie thought it did matter as they thought it was supposed to be a lesbian story from a lesbian perspective, and not a story that primarily mirrored a heterosexual perspective of a lesbian relationship. There was some discussion about whether this focus was because the author wanted it to sell to a primarily hetero audience. If so, we were disappointed in the lack of integrity, particularly as we assumed that Ali Smith was lesbian (or bisexual). We wondered whether the sister thought she was gay as well. She seemed to be obsessed with Anthea’s lesbian relationship, especially the scene where Robin puts her leg between Anthea’s.

At least, Kat noted, the author played down the hetero sex scene compared with the lesbian one.
Julie thought that the author was just trying to impersonate Jeanette Winterson (who, by the way, had a quote on the front cover of the book). Others were not sure they agreed.

Marg thought the book was really thin and lazy, and the author’s style really irritated her. She also thought that it was clunky the way the author introduced the myth. But then she admitted that she skipped over all the pages about the myth! She pointed out that the author described the myth, and then said it all over again. Everyone agreed that she could have done a parallel myth in a better way. (Sam thought that perhaps the lesbian relationship wasn’t meant to be the re-telling of the myth, and that in fact the girl-who-became-a-boy was Anthea’s grandfather. Sam thought that a better retelling of the myth could have been a story about a transgender character). We tried to think of other authors who have re-written myths (Jeanette Winterson, Margaret Attwood).

Marg though the water stuff was also clunky, but that the book was good for young people. There was some discussion about whether this was a ‘young adult’ book or not. Most people didn’t think so, although we all agreed that the characters were a bit ‘cardboard-cartoon-like’.

We did like her plain style though, and the currency of some of the popular culture references – especially the quote from the sister on page 56:

“My little sister is going to grow up into a dissatisfied older predatory totally dried-up abnormal woman like Judi Dench in that film Notes on a Scandal.”

Kat also liked the scene on page 140 where the sister is thinking about her new lover Paul in the shower:

Kat likes the fact that the shower is an intimate space for her, and relates to this. For Kat, how long she spends in the shower is indicative of how much is going on in her life.

Overall, despite our criticisms, we agreed that it was nice to read something a bit different, and that it was a fun, easy read, and overall we all enjoyed it.

The remainder of the evening was spent discussing Kat’s new dance style: Bollypole. This is a mix of bollywood and pole dancing, and Kat is about to take the Indian lesbian scene by storm.
We also spent quite a bit of time comparing the length of our fingers to see if we were really lesbians or not, although nobody could quite remember what the proportions were meant to be to say that you were or you weren’t!