Clea Shawn has enjoyed marriage, motherhood, love affairs with both sexes; and she’s traveled the world. Now she has come to the seemingly idyllic New England town of Roches Ridge, Vermont, looking for respite from the hungers of the heart and the lightning storms of the senses. What she finds is something else. What she learns makes for Lisa Alther‘s most sinfully irreverent, deliciously comic, and richly revelatory novel — an unforgettable tale of the intellectual graspings, emotional flip-flops, and erotic acrobatics of a woman who is not quite sure what she wants, but who wants it in the very worst way, and wants it now.
Bedrock was published by Knopf in 1990, Lisa Alther's first novel in five years. Clea Shawn, a travel photographer tired of Manhattan and her husband's affairs, moves to the picture-postcard village of Roches Ridge, Vermont, which turns out to hold born-again fanatics, eccentric neighbours and a lesbian teepee commune. At the heart of the comedy is Clea's long, unspoken love for her best friend Elke, a sculptor.
Alther has said she conceived the book as a contemporary update of a famous friendship between two women, one that would end less tragically than Virginia Woolf's suicide, and gave her heroines names that are anagrams of each other to suggest two sides of one personality. The glbtq encyclopedia cites Bedrock as a typical Alther novel in showing how hard it is to define who is a lesbian, with Elke asking whether a woman who never acts on her attraction to women is a lesbian all the same.
Marilyn French called the novel a hoot to read. Readers have written of it as the first lesbian book they read, and it is now available as an ebook from Open Road.
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Bedrock was published by Knopf in 1990, Lisa Alther's first novel in five years. Clea Shawn, a travel photographer tired of Manhattan and her husband's affairs, moves to the picture-postcard village of Roches Ridge, Vermont, which turns out to hold born-again fanatics, eccentric neighbours and a lesbian teepee commune. At the heart of the comedy is Clea's long, unspoken love for her best friend Elke, a sculptor.
Alther has said she conceived the book as a contemporary update of a famous friendship between two women, one that would end less tragically than Virginia Woolf's suicide, and gave her heroines names that are anagrams of each other to suggest two sides of one personality. The glbtq encyclopedia cites Bedrock as a typical Alther novel in showing how hard it is to define who is a lesbian, with Elke asking whether a woman who never acts on her attraction to women is a lesbian all the same.
Marilyn French called the novel a hoot to read. Readers have written of it as the first lesbian book they read, and it is now available as an ebook from Open Road.