The Mirror Dance by Susan Krieger

A study of a Midwestern lesbian community told through an interplay of its members' voices, echoing themes of self and community, sameness and difference, merger and separation, loss and change. Susan Krieger lived with the community for a year and then interviewed 78 women connected with it. Questions of privacy led her to dilemmas of identity and to a deeper problem: how a sense of self is lost, and how it may be recovered, in a community of likeness, intimacy and ideology that was also stigmatized. The book is organized around situations where conflicts over control of identity are sharpest and ends with an essay on method, 'Fiction and Social Science.