An entertaining, often poignant portrait of New York romance blending humor with heartache.
A young lesbian looks for love in New York City in this bittersweet memoir.
In 2010, Mollica, who wrote the “Broads in the Big Apple” column for GRL Magazine, abandoned what she saw as the preachy counterculture of lesbian San Francisco for what she hoped would be the raffish glamour of lesbian New York. Unfortunately, the glamour proved elusive: Her Friday nights were given over to TV-watching with the elderly widow next door, and her dating life revolved around hookups that felt meaningless. She finally found the “femme and aggressive” person she longed for in Juliet, a charismatic blond editor who set her pulse racing; they enjoyed electrifying sex and racy repartee. However, Juliet’s energy also entailed relentless womanizing. Much of the book covers Mollica and Juliet’s testy relationship, probing their mutual infidelities and stormy breakups and makeups, which rolled on until Juliet spiraled into drugs and suicide attempts. In telling her story, the author also explores a dysfunctional, abusive childhood in which her mother spent child support checks on jewelry instead of food; she also writes of a devastating rupture with a woman she considered a soul mate. Mollica’s reminiscences are both a celebration of the promise of New York to a young woman hungry for connection and a plangent account of the pitfalls of bad relationships and isolation. Her depictions of lesbian life and dating are well observed and brimming with humor (“You lost track of how many people you’ve slept with?” “No! I, ah, I just mean that it’s more than twenty, and either at or less than thirty. I think”), but she also writes with penetrating subtlety about the pain of sputtering relationships: “This time, something in her touch and embrace had drawn me in deeper and shown more of her vulnerability than any time before, yet I felt something else fading and falling apart.” The result is an exhilarating ride on Gotham’s emotional roller coaster.
An entertaining, often poignant portrait of New York romance blending humor with heartache.Pub Date: Nov. 8, 2022
ISBN: 979-8986958118
Page Count: 204
Publisher: Idée Fixe Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 24, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An ambitious and striking comment on art, sanity, and human endeavor.
A writer explores his struggles with mental illness and the death of his father in this experimental memoir composed of a single run-on sentence.
The premise is quite simple: Cowen set out to write and publish the longest sentence ever in the English language without stopping to edit it along the way. The sentence quickly becomes a diary of sorts in which the author explores some of the pressing concerns of his life, including his perceived failures as a writer, his struggles with bipolar disorder (a condition he shared with his father), and his father’s recent suicide. “I haven’t been processing my grief the way I wanted to yet about my dad’s death,” writes Cowen when the subject initially rears its head, “and I’ve been wanting to write something about my dad, and his dad and me and maybe also my dad’s hero, Abraham Lincoln, as he is also said to have been mentally ill at times, or at least a melancholic.” Along the way, the author delves into the history of really long sentences, from William Faulkner and James Joyce to current world record holder, Jonathan Coe (Cowen checks in periodically to see if he’s beaten Coe yet), and similarly long-winded writers. The author also examines other figures suffering from bipolar disorder, like Kanye West, and any other bits of popular culture that stray into his mind. The book is written in a stream-of-consciousness style that veers from critical commentary to myopically metafictional sections about the process of writing the sentence: “Recursivity is something I have been doing with these commas, and the ands, and the whiches, and which is like this, and that is a recursive clause right there, and this is one, too, see they are pretty cool, you just put them in, with a comma, like so.” As an Oulipo-style experiment in form, the volume is certainly an impressive feat, particularly in the way Cowen manages to weave in discussions of mental illness and mania. That said, it’s obviously an acquired taste, and there are portions where the project begins to feel inevitably redundant. But those who stick it out will find that they have a new relationship not only to English syntax, but to the peculiar workings of the human mind as well.
An ambitious and striking comment on art, sanity, and human endeavor.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-66097-064-3
Page Count: 345
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: June 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A highly readable, boots-on-the-ground war memoir by a noncombatant.
A devout member of the Seventh-day Adventist Church remembers his time in the military during the Vietnam War.
Debut author Beaven opens his story with an in-depth account of his training at Fort Bragg in North Carolina and his subsequent deployment to Vietnam. Right away, he notes how his service differed from that of most other young men in the 1960s, as he was a noncombatant Army medic who swore on religious principles never to carry or fire a weapon: “I went to Nam with religious goals and standards that were far different than most,” he writes. “I still have them.” The book’s latter parts tell the story of his time at war, and thanks to the author’s simple, accessible prose style, these memories have a more appealing immediacy than what one might find in a broader-sweep narrative history of wartime. Beaven is a natural storyteller, and some of his anecdotes show the polish that comes from frequent repetition over the years. He also offers a big-picture view of events with a blunt sense of humor that’s very appealing: “There was a great deal of fatalism in the service. ‘When my number comes up, I’m going to go.’ Needless to say, this is all hogwash….I never saw anyone stand up in the middle of a firefight and say, ‘Nyay, nyah, you can’t hit me.’ ” As he presents an insider’s view of what mucking through the hostile countryside was like, he often reveals small, engaging details; he mentions, for example, how troops were issued baseball-style caps but wore floppy slouch hats instead, both for their functionality and because they “made you look like a combat veteran instead of some camp jockey.” Beaven received decorations for his service, but his memoir benefits greatly from his just-one-of-the-guys humility.
A highly readable, boots-on-the-ground war memoir by a noncombatant.Pub Date: Jan. 27, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4787-0480-5
Page Count: -
Publisher: Outskirts Press
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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