If you’ve spent any time in Québec feminist writing, lesbian writing or avant-garde writing, you’ve run into Nicole Brossard. If you’ve spent time in all three, you’ve probably noticed she’s the only person standing in the middle of the Venn diagram. That’s more or less what poet Sina Queyras means when she calls Brossard “a … Read more
Start with the title. Rebent Sinner is a play on “repent, sinner,” the kind of thing shouted from street corners at people like Ivan Coyote. Change one letter and it becomes something else: a sinner who has been bent, and bent again, and is still standing. Coyote has always been good at taking a slur … Read more
Take a look at Lauren Hough’s work history. United States Air Force airman. Cable installer. Bouncer at a gay club. Writer. Now add the childhood: raised in a cult that moved her family around Germany, Japan, Texas and Chile. That’s not a résumé. That’s the outline of a picaresque novel, except it all happened, and … Read more
Early in her adult life, Beverly Little Thunder had a dream. In it she was offered a choice of ponds and picked one with lots of lily pads and no frogs, because she wanted to build a community. According to the /books entry, that’s exactly what she went on to do for the rest of … Read more
On New Year’s Eve in 1947, Patricia Highsmith raised a toast. She drank to “all the devils, lusts, passions, greeds, envies, loves, hates, strange desires” and wished to be left free of her inner struggles. Richard Bradford used that toast as the title of his 2021 biography, and it’s hard to imagine a better one. … Read more
Every year, CBC’s Canada Reads asks a panel of well-known Canadians to argue for one book the whole country should read. In 2020, the winner was a memoir by a queer Muslim woman who grew up in Pakistan and found herself in Toronto. Actor Amanda Brugel championed it, and the book was Samra Habib’s We … Read more
The subtitle is the first clue. Crossfire: A Litany for Survival borrows its second half from Audre Lorde, whose poem “A Litany for Survival” has been a touchstone for Black lesbian writers since the 1970s. Putting that phrase on your cover is a statement of lineage. Staceyann Chin is telling you exactly whose tradition she’s … Read more
Imagine turning on Netflix and finding a version of yourself on the screen. Same past, same crimes, same ex-girlfriend. Different name, better eyeliner. That’s roughly what happened to Cleary Wolters. Wolters is the real-life inspiration for Alex Vause, the glamorous drug-trade girlfriend Laura Prepon played on Orange Is the New Black. The series was adapted … Read more
Some memoirs take 500 pages to get out of the author’s childhood. Casey Legler’s Godspeed covers an Olympic career, an addiction, and a teenager’s near-total collapse in 176. The New York Times called it “lean and ferocious,” which is about as accurate a two-word review as you’ll find. The shortness fits the subject. Legler was … Read more
Some book titles describe. Some titles argue. Diana Souhami’s No Modernism Without Lesbians picks a fight on the cover and dares you to disagree. The claim is simple. The literary and artistic revolution we call Modernism, the movement that gave us Joyce, Hemingway, Picasso and the rest, didn’t just happen to have some lesbians standing … Read more