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Three
One yellow April morning, a 17-year-old girl asks herself, 'Do I dare to eat a peach?’ What she decides will send her life in one of three directions.
That morning is long past. Now she is 41.
On one life path, she is Kitty. She’s been happily married for 23 years. Happily enough until Faye, her professor, kisses her.
On another path, she is Katherine, a physician. After the death of an old love, she contacts the one lover who still haunts her: a woman who renounced her for God.
On a third path, she calls herself Ántonia. She’s barely survived the implosion of a lesbian utopian commune, one built on an abandoned oil rig.
Who are we? Who haven't we been? Have we dared? Three of one woman's possible lives are about to collide.
That morning is long past. Now she is 41.
On one life path, she is Kitty. She’s been happily married for 23 years. Happily enough until Faye, her professor, kisses her.
On another path, she is Katherine, a physician. After the death of an old love, she contacts the one lover who still haunts her: a woman who renounced her for God.
On a third path, she calls herself Ántonia. She’s barely survived the implosion of a lesbian utopian commune, one built on an abandoned oil rig.
Who are we? Who haven't we been? Have we dared? Three of one woman's possible lives are about to collide.
320 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2012
7 people are currently reading
175 people want to read
About the author
Annemarie Monahan
1 book13 followersMy first novel, THREE, is out at last! My publisher (Flashpoint Press, an imprint of PM Press, Oakland, CA) and I both have copies and ebooks for sale, as do the usual online retailers. Or support your local independent book store!
"With an air of myth, an acute sense of irony, and a climactic sex scene you'll never forget, this savory book will keep a smirk of pleasure smeared across your face at every pithy dialogue, sharp observation, and lyrical turn of phrase." —www.LambdaLiterary.org
"A beautifully written literary novel." —DIVA Magazine
"Monahan uses language beautifully. Everything she attempts to achieve with imagery, allusion, and forays into science and poetry, she achieves." —Cascadia Subduction Zone
One yellow April morning, a 17 year old girl asks herself, “Do I dare to eat a peach?" Three different answers will send her down three very different paths.
That morning is long past. Now she is 41.
Kitty Trevelyan has been happily married 23 years. Happily enough. Until her professor asks her for coffee and kisses her.
Dr. Katherine North's memory of two lovers chafes her like a hair shirt. After reading one has died, she contacts the other—only to discover that she has been renounced for God.
Ántonia searches the sea-horizon every evening. In the last light, she can glimpse it: a feminist Utopia built on an abandoned oil rig, led by her charismatic and bipolar lover. Her lost Eden made by Eves.
Who are we? Who haven't we been? Have we dared? Three of one woman's possible lives are about to collide.
You can hear more and read the first few chapters here, at my new site: http://annemarie-monahan.com
Annemarie Monahan is a graduate of Bryn Mawr College. She lives in Western Massachusetts with two rescue parrots and a library gone feral.
"She was not quite what you would call refined. She was not quite what you would call unrefined. She was the kind of person that keeps a parrot."
- Mark Twain
This is what she says about her Goodreads library:
This is an ongoing effort to tame the library, with fewer than half the titles entered. My room of books has overflowed into the hall and down the stairs.
I do own all the books listed here. I don't love them all equally; most are worthy of saving but not praising, some are brilliant or beautiful, while yet others are frankly repulsive and I don't know why I allow them in the house. Rather like people.
"With an air of myth, an acute sense of irony, and a climactic sex scene you'll never forget, this savory book will keep a smirk of pleasure smeared across your face at every pithy dialogue, sharp observation, and lyrical turn of phrase." —www.LambdaLiterary.org
"A beautifully written literary novel." —DIVA Magazine
"Monahan uses language beautifully. Everything she attempts to achieve with imagery, allusion, and forays into science and poetry, she achieves." —Cascadia Subduction Zone
One yellow April morning, a 17 year old girl asks herself, “Do I dare to eat a peach?" Three different answers will send her down three very different paths.
That morning is long past. Now she is 41.
Kitty Trevelyan has been happily married 23 years. Happily enough. Until her professor asks her for coffee and kisses her.
Dr. Katherine North's memory of two lovers chafes her like a hair shirt. After reading one has died, she contacts the other—only to discover that she has been renounced for God.
Ántonia searches the sea-horizon every evening. In the last light, she can glimpse it: a feminist Utopia built on an abandoned oil rig, led by her charismatic and bipolar lover. Her lost Eden made by Eves.
Who are we? Who haven't we been? Have we dared? Three of one woman's possible lives are about to collide.
You can hear more and read the first few chapters here, at my new site: http://annemarie-monahan.com
Annemarie Monahan is a graduate of Bryn Mawr College. She lives in Western Massachusetts with two rescue parrots and a library gone feral.
"She was not quite what you would call refined. She was not quite what you would call unrefined. She was the kind of person that keeps a parrot."
- Mark Twain
This is what she says about her Goodreads library:
This is an ongoing effort to tame the library, with fewer than half the titles entered. My room of books has overflowed into the hall and down the stairs.
I do own all the books listed here. I don't love them all equally; most are worthy of saving but not praising, some are brilliant or beautiful, while yet others are frankly repulsive and I don't know why I allow them in the house. Rather like people.
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Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews
September 1, 2018
This novel is remarkable to me in so many ways.
First a confession: even after years of reading books from small presses I still carry around in my head an idea that literary publishing is like a stairway to heaven, where the most worthy books are published by the most famous literary publishers, like knofp and fsg, and that books somehow sort themselves out by literary merit from then on down to smaller presses and then to self-published books. This novel has smashed that idea forever. From now on I'm going to think of literary publishing more like a walk in the most amazing forest imaginable, where you can find perfection in every direction and in every shape and size.
Because this novel charmed me completely. It is both lyrical and intellectual. It performs the astonishing feat of chronicling the lives of three women who happen to be the same woman on three different paths, and the novel is so acutely observant, and so fair to each woman, that all three are beloved to me and equally memorable. Their lives are so unique. They have made completely different choices and yet they really did feel like the same person to me. This person is at heart a very sensitive caregiver who experiences emotions deeply and who moves forward in life with a keen understanding that each choice she makes closes some doors and opens others.
I so enjoyed reading this novel. It is tender and thought-provoking. I will be reading it again.
First a confession: even after years of reading books from small presses I still carry around in my head an idea that literary publishing is like a stairway to heaven, where the most worthy books are published by the most famous literary publishers, like knofp and fsg, and that books somehow sort themselves out by literary merit from then on down to smaller presses and then to self-published books. This novel has smashed that idea forever. From now on I'm going to think of literary publishing more like a walk in the most amazing forest imaginable, where you can find perfection in every direction and in every shape and size.
Because this novel charmed me completely. It is both lyrical and intellectual. It performs the astonishing feat of chronicling the lives of three women who happen to be the same woman on three different paths, and the novel is so acutely observant, and so fair to each woman, that all three are beloved to me and equally memorable. Their lives are so unique. They have made completely different choices and yet they really did feel like the same person to me. This person is at heart a very sensitive caregiver who experiences emotions deeply and who moves forward in life with a keen understanding that each choice she makes closes some doors and opens others.
I so enjoyed reading this novel. It is tender and thought-provoking. I will be reading it again.
July 1, 2013
I reviewed this book in the January 2013 issue of Stirring: http://www.sundresspublications.com/stirring/archives/v15/e1/monahan.htm. Here's the text of the review:
The premise of Annemarie Monahan's intriguing novel Three is that the three narrators, Katherine, Kitty, and Ántonia (formerly Kate), all age 41, are in fact the same person. No, this isn't a case of multiple personalities, but don't worry if you've forgotten the details of that NOVA episode on the multiverse. The author, wisely, doesn't explain how these three parallel lives are possible, leaving the reader to become engrossed in the rich character studies and ponder larger questions of how circumstances and experiences shape the self: If your life had taken a different turn, would you still be you? Would you even recognize that alternate self if you somehow met her? To Monahan's credit, she allows us to work through these questions--to live the questions vicariously through the narrators--without insisting on an answer.
Katherine, by far the most prosperous of the three, is a physician in Connecticut, accomplished, successful, and comfortable with her lesbian identity. By contrast, Kitty works in a school library and is now earning her bachelor's degree part-time, after early (unplanned) motherhood and marriage made her put her own aspirations on hold. But the first adult narrator we hear from is Ántonia, whose traumatic experiences at a failed lesbian-feminist commune are so deliciously bizarre that it's almost a relief to learn of them in fragments. When the novel opens she's living alone in a slum apartment, eking out a living as a phone psychic and struggling with chronic pain after surviving a lightning strike.
One of the many pleasures of the novel is the process of piecing together how each narrator has arrived at the present moment--and how, if each of them is the same, they became so different. The most ordinary of the three is the suburban wife/mother Kitty, but her story ends up being surprisingly moving. In high school she is the good girl, the smart girl, but her future is derailed by her sexual naïveté and her authoritarian parents. Kitty is a perfect example of how heteronormativity can act on a girl before she truly understands her own sexual being, forcing her life onto a track that, while never unpleasant, is not truly what she wanted. She loves her husband (her "best friend"), loves her kids, but is starting to realize that she yearns for something more, and is deeply unsettled to find herself feeling intense attraction, even passion, for another woman.
As a fiction writer I appreciated the many writerly challenges that Monahan has set for herself. She is unafraid to let her brainy characters think, talk and write to each other about literature and religion and life and love and sex. There is no clear cut plot in the sense of an obvious rising action, climax, and denouement; rather, we have three juxtaposed portraits of women at different phases of self-discovery, none of which is neatly resolved by novel's end. Monahan uses both first-person narration and the present tense, another writerly challenge that places constraints on how and when an author can work in backstory and characterization. But these choices help to evoke a modernist, stream-of-consciousness feel, appropriate for a novel whose characters love T.S. Eliot and enthusiastically discuss the novels of Virginia Woolf. In fact, the "Do I dare to eat a peach?" section of "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" is a recurring motif, and Kitty's musings on the passing of time ("The last squirt of shampoo. The dulled razor. The lint that slowly chokes the trap. . . . Another check register. A fresh sponge. A new goldfish" [232]) seem another way of "measur[ing] out [one's] life with coffee spoons."
I also applaud the author's frank and celebratory depiction of lesbian erotic life. In a recent essay on the constraints felt by women authors trying to write about sex, Heather Fowler notes that when female authors depict "the pain, the violation of the female body, . . . [we] are accepted and lauded for it. . . . But when approaching the kingdom of enjoyable sex-oriented interaction, . . . too few of us are brave enough . . . to elaborate on the description of the love act's exquisite joy." Monahan is definitely brave enough to bestow on her characters moments of transcendent understanding and joy, both sexual and spiritual, when "the door of perception [is] wrenched open" (94).
Another highlight of the novel is the characters' sardonic humor: Ántonia revels in her kitschiness as a phone psychic: she speaks in a fake Transylvanian accent; she hits a tiny gong at the beginning of each session. And here is Katherine's hilariously cantankerous response to a fundraising email from a Catholic bishops' organization: "Gentlemen, and I use the term loosely, please do not confuse my enthusiasm for your music with an enthusiasm for your church. If you cannot feed your teeming flocks, I suggest you rethink your ban on birth control and homosexuality. Until then, please do not darken my inbox door" (40).
Then there are quiet moments of introspection that provide deep insight into the characters. Waking up in the middle of the night, Kitty studies her husband, asleep in the moonlight: "Kevin's turned and thrown off the blanket, its crumples like waves under the moon. One foot dangles over the edge, dappled. In boxers, his hairy body runs in one bright line, taperless from waist through thigh. His chest glows ruddy as Mars in the shine-shadow. He's crooked an arm against the brilliance, his night-beard illuminated in strips. I can't see his face. I watch his balding head, suddenly alien in the blue, merciless light" (123-24). At this point in the novel the reader has already seen that Kevin is a good and loving man; in this vivid word portrait, the fact that she sees him as aesthetically pleasing but unknowable ("I can't see his face") and "alien" tells us as much about Kitty and her newly acknowledged love of women as it does about the husband who fails to ignite her passion.
Like most complex and ambitious literary novels, this one bears re-reading--in fact almost demands it. As improbable as the premise may be, the beautifully drawn characters are believable and memorable.
The premise of Annemarie Monahan's intriguing novel Three is that the three narrators, Katherine, Kitty, and Ántonia (formerly Kate), all age 41, are in fact the same person. No, this isn't a case of multiple personalities, but don't worry if you've forgotten the details of that NOVA episode on the multiverse. The author, wisely, doesn't explain how these three parallel lives are possible, leaving the reader to become engrossed in the rich character studies and ponder larger questions of how circumstances and experiences shape the self: If your life had taken a different turn, would you still be you? Would you even recognize that alternate self if you somehow met her? To Monahan's credit, she allows us to work through these questions--to live the questions vicariously through the narrators--without insisting on an answer.
Katherine, by far the most prosperous of the three, is a physician in Connecticut, accomplished, successful, and comfortable with her lesbian identity. By contrast, Kitty works in a school library and is now earning her bachelor's degree part-time, after early (unplanned) motherhood and marriage made her put her own aspirations on hold. But the first adult narrator we hear from is Ántonia, whose traumatic experiences at a failed lesbian-feminist commune are so deliciously bizarre that it's almost a relief to learn of them in fragments. When the novel opens she's living alone in a slum apartment, eking out a living as a phone psychic and struggling with chronic pain after surviving a lightning strike.
One of the many pleasures of the novel is the process of piecing together how each narrator has arrived at the present moment--and how, if each of them is the same, they became so different. The most ordinary of the three is the suburban wife/mother Kitty, but her story ends up being surprisingly moving. In high school she is the good girl, the smart girl, but her future is derailed by her sexual naïveté and her authoritarian parents. Kitty is a perfect example of how heteronormativity can act on a girl before she truly understands her own sexual being, forcing her life onto a track that, while never unpleasant, is not truly what she wanted. She loves her husband (her "best friend"), loves her kids, but is starting to realize that she yearns for something more, and is deeply unsettled to find herself feeling intense attraction, even passion, for another woman.
As a fiction writer I appreciated the many writerly challenges that Monahan has set for herself. She is unafraid to let her brainy characters think, talk and write to each other about literature and religion and life and love and sex. There is no clear cut plot in the sense of an obvious rising action, climax, and denouement; rather, we have three juxtaposed portraits of women at different phases of self-discovery, none of which is neatly resolved by novel's end. Monahan uses both first-person narration and the present tense, another writerly challenge that places constraints on how and when an author can work in backstory and characterization. But these choices help to evoke a modernist, stream-of-consciousness feel, appropriate for a novel whose characters love T.S. Eliot and enthusiastically discuss the novels of Virginia Woolf. In fact, the "Do I dare to eat a peach?" section of "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" is a recurring motif, and Kitty's musings on the passing of time ("The last squirt of shampoo. The dulled razor. The lint that slowly chokes the trap. . . . Another check register. A fresh sponge. A new goldfish" [232]) seem another way of "measur[ing] out [one's] life with coffee spoons."
I also applaud the author's frank and celebratory depiction of lesbian erotic life. In a recent essay on the constraints felt by women authors trying to write about sex, Heather Fowler notes that when female authors depict "the pain, the violation of the female body, . . . [we] are accepted and lauded for it. . . . But when approaching the kingdom of enjoyable sex-oriented interaction, . . . too few of us are brave enough . . . to elaborate on the description of the love act's exquisite joy." Monahan is definitely brave enough to bestow on her characters moments of transcendent understanding and joy, both sexual and spiritual, when "the door of perception [is] wrenched open" (94).
Another highlight of the novel is the characters' sardonic humor: Ántonia revels in her kitschiness as a phone psychic: she speaks in a fake Transylvanian accent; she hits a tiny gong at the beginning of each session. And here is Katherine's hilariously cantankerous response to a fundraising email from a Catholic bishops' organization: "Gentlemen, and I use the term loosely, please do not confuse my enthusiasm for your music with an enthusiasm for your church. If you cannot feed your teeming flocks, I suggest you rethink your ban on birth control and homosexuality. Until then, please do not darken my inbox door" (40).
Then there are quiet moments of introspection that provide deep insight into the characters. Waking up in the middle of the night, Kitty studies her husband, asleep in the moonlight: "Kevin's turned and thrown off the blanket, its crumples like waves under the moon. One foot dangles over the edge, dappled. In boxers, his hairy body runs in one bright line, taperless from waist through thigh. His chest glows ruddy as Mars in the shine-shadow. He's crooked an arm against the brilliance, his night-beard illuminated in strips. I can't see his face. I watch his balding head, suddenly alien in the blue, merciless light" (123-24). At this point in the novel the reader has already seen that Kevin is a good and loving man; in this vivid word portrait, the fact that she sees him as aesthetically pleasing but unknowable ("I can't see his face") and "alien" tells us as much about Kitty and her newly acknowledged love of women as it does about the husband who fails to ignite her passion.
Like most complex and ambitious literary novels, this one bears re-reading--in fact almost demands it. As improbable as the premise may be, the beautifully drawn characters are believable and memorable.
June 25, 2012
I’ve always loved T.S. Eliot’s "The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock" for it’s yearning, rueful melancholy. So the back cover copy of Annemarie Monahan’s Three had me immediately hooked when its seventeen year old protagonist asks herself, "Do I dare to eat the peach?"
Her decision will take her on one of three very different paths. On the right we have the suburban soccer mom Kitty dealing with the deteriorating health of her dictatorial father while at the same time questioning her sexuality after twenty years of marriage. Somewhere in the middle is Katherine, a no-nonsense, unattached holistic doctor taking stock of her past relationships. And, on the far left is Antonia, a radical feminist involved with the charismatic leader of a separatist utopian community of women living on an abandoned oil rig off the coast of Connecticut.
There’s really so much to love here. Monahan’s writing is smart and insightful. The book’s unique structure - each version of the main character presented in alternating chapters, creates a nice tension and allows each storyline to slowly reveal itself in relief against the others while illuminating different aspects of them at the same time. The characters are all extremely well rendered, particularly the three incarnations of Katherine/Kitty/Antonia. Despite her living these radically different lives, the reader can always recognize her as the same person underneath it all - wry, clever and introspective.
And funny. Did I mention funny?
While the high quality of the writing was somewhat unexpected, the real surprise to be found here is the humor. Whether it’s Kitty’s swinging professor’s unforeseen proposition, Katherine’s dry responses to her thickheaded patients or Antonia versus the horde of breatharians out to sabotage the self-sufficiency of the feminist homeland, Monahan manages to skewer halfwits on both sides of the socio-political spectrum with some truly laugh-out-loud moments. All this while still presenting a work that is rich in real human emotion.
Three is that rare find, a work of literature that keeps you on your toes intellectually but also makes feel something. It certainly had me examining my own life. And ultimately what I took away from it is that no matter how one chooses to live one’s life, everyone has regrets and what ifs. Like that old Buddhist saying goes, "Wherever you go, there you are."
Her decision will take her on one of three very different paths. On the right we have the suburban soccer mom Kitty dealing with the deteriorating health of her dictatorial father while at the same time questioning her sexuality after twenty years of marriage. Somewhere in the middle is Katherine, a no-nonsense, unattached holistic doctor taking stock of her past relationships. And, on the far left is Antonia, a radical feminist involved with the charismatic leader of a separatist utopian community of women living on an abandoned oil rig off the coast of Connecticut.
There’s really so much to love here. Monahan’s writing is smart and insightful. The book’s unique structure - each version of the main character presented in alternating chapters, creates a nice tension and allows each storyline to slowly reveal itself in relief against the others while illuminating different aspects of them at the same time. The characters are all extremely well rendered, particularly the three incarnations of Katherine/Kitty/Antonia. Despite her living these radically different lives, the reader can always recognize her as the same person underneath it all - wry, clever and introspective.
And funny. Did I mention funny?
While the high quality of the writing was somewhat unexpected, the real surprise to be found here is the humor. Whether it’s Kitty’s swinging professor’s unforeseen proposition, Katherine’s dry responses to her thickheaded patients or Antonia versus the horde of breatharians out to sabotage the self-sufficiency of the feminist homeland, Monahan manages to skewer halfwits on both sides of the socio-political spectrum with some truly laugh-out-loud moments. All this while still presenting a work that is rich in real human emotion.
Three is that rare find, a work of literature that keeps you on your toes intellectually but also makes feel something. It certainly had me examining my own life. And ultimately what I took away from it is that no matter how one chooses to live one’s life, everyone has regrets and what ifs. Like that old Buddhist saying goes, "Wherever you go, there you are."
May 15, 2018
Although all, originally, the same woman, that peach took them each on different journeys. And despite the fact it is relationships and love that each of them are struggling with in their stories, they are all exploring different aspects of that. Antonia wants to help save the woman she loves from herself as well as a group of well-meaning but self-destructive earth child hippies, but at the expense of herself. Katherine is contemplating lost love, things left unsaid, and the different experiences people have of the same events. Kitty is finally allowing herself to wake up and explore aspects of her own desire she has kept so well-hidden. There is something here everyone should be able to relate to.
The writing is wonderful. It is clever and witty and poetic and meaningful–and i’m still not sure how it manages to be all those things at once, but it does. And it reads so effortlessly that it was simply a joy to pick up. This was a book i didn’t want to put down, but it was also a book i was enjoying enough to want to make it last. I think i managed quite well, finishing at a sedate pace of 10 days. But i still want to be reading it now.
A longer review can be read at my book blog: Marvel at Words.
The writing is wonderful. It is clever and witty and poetic and meaningful–and i’m still not sure how it manages to be all those things at once, but it does. And it reads so effortlessly that it was simply a joy to pick up. This was a book i didn’t want to put down, but it was also a book i was enjoying enough to want to make it last. I think i managed quite well, finishing at a sedate pace of 10 days. But i still want to be reading it now.
A longer review can be read at my book blog: Marvel at Words.
May 15, 2012
This is an alternative look at the road not taken genre. Instead the story alternates among 3 women who may be alternatives of one woman had she taken 3 separate roads. Admittedly, it's a little confusing, but there's a quotable line or idea on almost every page. One woman, Kitty, an intellectual who is always up for new experiences, tries out sex with her boyfriend, gets pregnant so gets married and must turn her back on the college of her dreams, Fernhurst, which apparently is a lesbian paradise. The other two, Antonia and Katherine both do attend Fernhurst and make some life long relationships. Antonia's life is the most radical and bizarre. She joins a woman's separatist movement that sets up a colony in the ocean named Atlantis. She a scientist, a willing worker for the good of the community, which is started by the charismatic Josephine. This is a quote from one of Josephine's early recruitment lectures: There are those who say, 'Josephine, we've moved beyond gender. I'm not a woman, I'm a person who can't be defined by gender.' Well. Have men moved beyond gender? Are we safe yet? Do skinheads drop their tire chains if you say, I'm not black, I'm a dark-skinned human being, equal citizen of the world?...An oppressed group cannot decide to move beyond their oppression. Only the oppressor gets to decide that.
There are those who saw that separating from men is hatred. There are those who say,'Oh, not all women are good. I know terrible women. Women are just as bad as men.' As bad as men? Tell me, if women act the same as men, where are the bodies piled? Where are the masses of men murdered every single day by women? In what other oppression do we equate nastiness or selfishness or just plain anger with murder? Of course not all women are good? But are women honor-killing men? Are women abducting 6-year-old boys for rape? Have women built an international, multi-billion-dollar industry selling films where women gag men with their genitals, ram fists up their asses until they prolapse, shit on their bodies?
Strong words, and worth pondering. But as with many major revolutions, revolutionaries can make their ideal into a religion. When that happens logic goes out the window. Look to Mao's China or Stalin's USSR. What follows is misery and destruction.
Three is a very good exploration of religion, ideals, sexuality, parenting, health care, timidity, courage, and decisions. Highly recommended to anyone interested in these ideas.
There are those who saw that separating from men is hatred. There are those who say,'Oh, not all women are good. I know terrible women. Women are just as bad as men.' As bad as men? Tell me, if women act the same as men, where are the bodies piled? Where are the masses of men murdered every single day by women? In what other oppression do we equate nastiness or selfishness or just plain anger with murder? Of course not all women are good? But are women honor-killing men? Are women abducting 6-year-old boys for rape? Have women built an international, multi-billion-dollar industry selling films where women gag men with their genitals, ram fists up their asses until they prolapse, shit on their bodies?
Strong words, and worth pondering. But as with many major revolutions, revolutionaries can make their ideal into a religion. When that happens logic goes out the window. Look to Mao's China or Stalin's USSR. What follows is misery and destruction.
Three is a very good exploration of religion, ideals, sexuality, parenting, health care, timidity, courage, and decisions. Highly recommended to anyone interested in these ideas.
Read
August 7, 2019I can’t rate this book as I couldn’t get through it. It may be brilliant but it’s just not for me.
March 21, 2014
"Three" by Annemarie Monahan is a fascinating read. I recommend it to anyone who appreciates beautiful writing. Derrick Jensen, author of "Endgame" and "A Language Older Than Words" says it is "The novel I've been waiting for." I agree.
April 15, 2023
Sadly, it’s not very often that you come across truly well-written and meaningful lesbian literature, so when I began reading Three and saw that the unifying theme of the novel was based on “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”, I tucked in and took a huge, gratifying bite.
Thus, Monahan starts her novel on a seemingly ordinary morning in the life of a 17 year-old young woman whose trinity of inner voices decides her fate in one of three ways; which part of her will “dare to eat the peach” sitting in wait in her grandma’s bowl on the kitchen counter?
The lives of the three separate characters that result from her decision that ordinary morning, play out in totally different, yet essentially similar truths. We meet Antonia (Kate) who doesn’t hesitate to take a big, juicy bite, alluding to the radical feminist path her life will follow. We are then introduced to Katherine, who chooses not to eat the peach offered her, while creating her own journey that leads to a successful career as a physician. Lastly, Kitty emerges, and it is her decision to put the peach back into the bowl, fully intending to eat it later, that really hit home with this reader.
Antonia, Katherine, and Kitty all are granted acceptance to Fernhurst College, which, as an all Women’s prestigious institution, could represent the essential sisterhood that all three characters ultimately embrace. Though Kitty defers her admission to Fernhurst and follows a heteronormative trajectory due to an unplanned pregnancy, her inner self eventually steers her toward her truth after being kissed by a female professor decades later as an adult student. Katherine, whose life path allowed her to find professional success, while living her sexual truth, finds herself at mid-life struggling with the reality of not being able to fulfill her lost lover’s spiritual needs. “She left me when the tulips bloomed, leaving me the burden of renewal.” Antonia, also a Fernhurst alum, has lived her adult life surrounded by other equally passionate women striving to separate from the patriarchal culture, finds that the utopian ideals she had been seeking were ultimately lacking the connection and humanity she truly sought.
Annemarie Monahan’s novel reads like well-crafted and flowing prose, and I found myself underlining phrases, lines, and entire paragraphs to be read again and again, and slowly savored on the tongue. Three should be essential reading for all those considering which life paths to choose, for those looking back at the choices made, and for everyone who dares to eat that peach!
Thus, Monahan starts her novel on a seemingly ordinary morning in the life of a 17 year-old young woman whose trinity of inner voices decides her fate in one of three ways; which part of her will “dare to eat the peach” sitting in wait in her grandma’s bowl on the kitchen counter?
The lives of the three separate characters that result from her decision that ordinary morning, play out in totally different, yet essentially similar truths. We meet Antonia (Kate) who doesn’t hesitate to take a big, juicy bite, alluding to the radical feminist path her life will follow. We are then introduced to Katherine, who chooses not to eat the peach offered her, while creating her own journey that leads to a successful career as a physician. Lastly, Kitty emerges, and it is her decision to put the peach back into the bowl, fully intending to eat it later, that really hit home with this reader.
Antonia, Katherine, and Kitty all are granted acceptance to Fernhurst College, which, as an all Women’s prestigious institution, could represent the essential sisterhood that all three characters ultimately embrace. Though Kitty defers her admission to Fernhurst and follows a heteronormative trajectory due to an unplanned pregnancy, her inner self eventually steers her toward her truth after being kissed by a female professor decades later as an adult student. Katherine, whose life path allowed her to find professional success, while living her sexual truth, finds herself at mid-life struggling with the reality of not being able to fulfill her lost lover’s spiritual needs. “She left me when the tulips bloomed, leaving me the burden of renewal.” Antonia, also a Fernhurst alum, has lived her adult life surrounded by other equally passionate women striving to separate from the patriarchal culture, finds that the utopian ideals she had been seeking were ultimately lacking the connection and humanity she truly sought.
Annemarie Monahan’s novel reads like well-crafted and flowing prose, and I found myself underlining phrases, lines, and entire paragraphs to be read again and again, and slowly savored on the tongue. Three should be essential reading for all those considering which life paths to choose, for those looking back at the choices made, and for everyone who dares to eat that peach!
March 15, 2023
At the heart of quantum mechanics an experiment, more than a hundred years old but constantly updated, suggests that every event at a subatomic level has the potential of multiple outcomes. The double slit at the core of this experiment serves as a gateway to multiple worlds, each of which may evolve differently to the others. Although neither this experiment or, sensibly, any other reason is invoked to explain it, Three explores the consequences of taking multiple different paths for one woman. The decision of whether to eat a peach (to eat it, to leave it in the bowl or to maybe eat it later) in this case being a stand-in for the double slit.
Although the three women, 24 years removed from that peachy morning, lead very different lives they share enough in common for us to recognize them as the same person. They share a fantastic sense of humor, Katherine’s especially biting, a common sexulaity and a quality that reminds me of the same physics experiment. Because in the experiment the observer plays a key role; the branching into different worlds happens when the observer becomes entangled with the experiment (there’s another explanation but its nonsensical). The three personae of K, though they will never observe each other, are keen observers; Katherine observes her past loves as keenly as she observes the symptoms of her patients, Antonia watches the path of her lover and their shared utopia unfold with a fearful acuteness that matches her ability to intuit her psychic phone line callers and Kitty seems to scour the details of her unsatisfactory life spill out as she does her grocery store bargains. The remarkable thing about the novel is that, despite the three K’s having acquired different personae, we never escape the fact that they were once the very same person.
The prose is wonderful and at times breathtaking. Given that it is such an imaginative and well told story it is surprising that I just happened to discover this novel at a local bookstore, rather than through a “because you read” suggestion algorithm of some kind, but that only made reading it all the more enjoyable.
Although the three women, 24 years removed from that peachy morning, lead very different lives they share enough in common for us to recognize them as the same person. They share a fantastic sense of humor, Katherine’s especially biting, a common sexulaity and a quality that reminds me of the same physics experiment. Because in the experiment the observer plays a key role; the branching into different worlds happens when the observer becomes entangled with the experiment (there’s another explanation but its nonsensical). The three personae of K, though they will never observe each other, are keen observers; Katherine observes her past loves as keenly as she observes the symptoms of her patients, Antonia watches the path of her lover and their shared utopia unfold with a fearful acuteness that matches her ability to intuit her psychic phone line callers and Kitty seems to scour the details of her unsatisfactory life spill out as she does her grocery store bargains. The remarkable thing about the novel is that, despite the three K’s having acquired different personae, we never escape the fact that they were once the very same person.
The prose is wonderful and at times breathtaking. Given that it is such an imaginative and well told story it is surprising that I just happened to discover this novel at a local bookstore, rather than through a “because you read” suggestion algorithm of some kind, but that only made reading it all the more enjoyable.
April 21, 2023
Well worth the read; here's a teaser ...
“How long did it take for you to realize that men as a class raped women as a class?”
“‘Women are just as bad as men.’ As bad as men? Tell me, if women act the same as men, where are the bodies piled? Where are the masses of men murdered every single day by women? In what other oppression do we equate nastiness or selfishness or just plain anger with murder? Of course not all women are good! But are women honor-killing men? Are women abducting 6-year-old boys for rape? Have women built an international, multi-billion-dollar industry selling films where women gag men with their genitals, ram fists up their asses until they prolapse, shit on their bodies?”
“How long did it take for you to realize that men as a class raped women as a class?”
“‘Women are just as bad as men.’ As bad as men? Tell me, if women act the same as men, where are the bodies piled? Where are the masses of men murdered every single day by women? In what other oppression do we equate nastiness or selfishness or just plain anger with murder? Of course not all women are good! But are women honor-killing men? Are women abducting 6-year-old boys for rape? Have women built an international, multi-billion-dollar industry selling films where women gag men with their genitals, ram fists up their asses until they prolapse, shit on their bodies?”
December 11, 2019
I’m gonna need to read this one again
September 7, 2015
Three was totally unexpected and awesome. Like watching an acrobat perform feats of expertise you never thought were possible or listening to an a cappella singer hit every note, part of the thrill is that the artist comes so close to danger while soaring above it. Lesbian lives in three connected stories are portrayed in microscopic detail that is honest, precise, and poetic. Indeed, it is a poem that launches the stories: three voices respond to J. Alfred Prufrock’s challenge: “Do I dare to eat a peach?”
Kitty, Katherine, and Ántonia, have lives familiar to lesbians of a certain age. Told in alternating episodes, each thread reveals unpredictable twists on the way to that certain age.
Kitty is almost a type, a married woman who becomes aware that her “hero-worship crushes” may signify a deeper unmet need. While Kitty’s story could be assumed to be the most conventionally cautious, we learn that when she dares to consume the peach, it does not result in freedom. She dreams of being the first in her family to go beyond high school and wins a scholarship to a famous women’s college. Her dreams are betrayed by an event more pathetic than tragic—a broken condom—but this is the era before legal abortion. “The dark and shoreless sea I’ve sensed inside me is only a wash of amniotic fluid. That presence I’ve felt isn’t some whispering god but a fetus, blobby, bulgy as a tadpole. We’re all just female bodies in the end.”
Katherine, the successful professional woman who did go to that famous women’s college and could have minored in lesbianism, is compelled by the death of an old love to examine “the state of my life and my conscience.” Her inventory of lovers happily allows for humor as it falls to Katherine to chart the uncertain depths and currents of sexuality. “There are no words when it’s real,” Katherine says, but one of the pleasures of this book is that Monahan finds surprising words to express a range of sexual reality from the banal to the transformative.
Ántonia of Atlantis, the telephone psychic who dispenses advice for $3.99 a minute, is “a refugee from a lost lesbian feminist utopia.” Her story in lesser hands could have been grotesque and absurd but is instead tragic beyond tears. “I loved her like justice. I loved her like hope. But in the final telling, here in the scouring light of colder, cloudless day, is that why I stayed to drown? ….Maybe impermissible pride insisted my courage mattered, that I would be weighed and not found wanting by a God I’d long not believed in, vindicated by a history that will never be written.”
I went to “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” because I wanted to see how well a bitter episode of Katherine’s fits the line: “That’s not what I meant at all.” I discovered that so very much of Three echoes and expands that poem. This rich novel abounds in literary and religious references, often couched in humor that shifts from groaner puns to sly asides. I suspect that the carefully crafted language, ideas, and imagery will reward more than one re-reading. Nearly every page contains some wise or clever observation that you want to remember; the following is one of my favorites, one of many:
"Time doesn’t tear away by years, bright wrap and ribbon, birthdays and Christmases and last days of school…. It doesn’t march shouting through the streets of Monday mornings and Friday pay-days, stutter-step like the tick of a punch clock.
No. Time passes unseen as a wind in the night.
The last squirt of shampoo. The dulled razor. The lint that slowly chokes the trap. Time blows unnoticed through our yards into our windows. Another check register. A fresh sponge. A new goldfish. Its debris accumulates like soil over a city, like silt into a harbor, layer after layer after layer until a new generation builds over the old. Time buries us, less measured than rain, silent as dust."
Kitty, Katherine, and Ántonia, have lives familiar to lesbians of a certain age. Told in alternating episodes, each thread reveals unpredictable twists on the way to that certain age.
Kitty is almost a type, a married woman who becomes aware that her “hero-worship crushes” may signify a deeper unmet need. While Kitty’s story could be assumed to be the most conventionally cautious, we learn that when she dares to consume the peach, it does not result in freedom. She dreams of being the first in her family to go beyond high school and wins a scholarship to a famous women’s college. Her dreams are betrayed by an event more pathetic than tragic—a broken condom—but this is the era before legal abortion. “The dark and shoreless sea I’ve sensed inside me is only a wash of amniotic fluid. That presence I’ve felt isn’t some whispering god but a fetus, blobby, bulgy as a tadpole. We’re all just female bodies in the end.”
Katherine, the successful professional woman who did go to that famous women’s college and could have minored in lesbianism, is compelled by the death of an old love to examine “the state of my life and my conscience.” Her inventory of lovers happily allows for humor as it falls to Katherine to chart the uncertain depths and currents of sexuality. “There are no words when it’s real,” Katherine says, but one of the pleasures of this book is that Monahan finds surprising words to express a range of sexual reality from the banal to the transformative.
Ántonia of Atlantis, the telephone psychic who dispenses advice for $3.99 a minute, is “a refugee from a lost lesbian feminist utopia.” Her story in lesser hands could have been grotesque and absurd but is instead tragic beyond tears. “I loved her like justice. I loved her like hope. But in the final telling, here in the scouring light of colder, cloudless day, is that why I stayed to drown? ….Maybe impermissible pride insisted my courage mattered, that I would be weighed and not found wanting by a God I’d long not believed in, vindicated by a history that will never be written.”
I went to “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” because I wanted to see how well a bitter episode of Katherine’s fits the line: “That’s not what I meant at all.” I discovered that so very much of Three echoes and expands that poem. This rich novel abounds in literary and religious references, often couched in humor that shifts from groaner puns to sly asides. I suspect that the carefully crafted language, ideas, and imagery will reward more than one re-reading. Nearly every page contains some wise or clever observation that you want to remember; the following is one of my favorites, one of many:
"Time doesn’t tear away by years, bright wrap and ribbon, birthdays and Christmases and last days of school…. It doesn’t march shouting through the streets of Monday mornings and Friday pay-days, stutter-step like the tick of a punch clock.
No. Time passes unseen as a wind in the night.
The last squirt of shampoo. The dulled razor. The lint that slowly chokes the trap. Time blows unnoticed through our yards into our windows. Another check register. A fresh sponge. A new goldfish. Its debris accumulates like soil over a city, like silt into a harbor, layer after layer after layer until a new generation builds over the old. Time buries us, less measured than rain, silent as dust."
August 13, 2013
Two stars because I learned some new words and, if better written, the underlying ideas here could have been quite captivating.
But this was dreadful. There was so much talk of poetry among the central characters and yet this book was so clinical, so unpoetic. It was unfocused and confusing and boring, though it had so much potential. The short back cover text explained things that the book itself didn't, and it would have been harder to get through without that information.
The dialogue was smart often and funny at times (and humor writing is tough, so bonus points for that). And the writing could be detailed (see "clinical") so it was easy to visualize some scenes and characters' facial expressions.
But the explorations of sex, of race, of misogyny and patriarchy, of other oppressions, felt so, I don't know, false. They weren't actualized. They didn't lift the story, except to attempt to say, "Hey, look, I'm talking about this real stuff." It was disappointing. Kitty, Antonia and Katherine were distinct characters, but again didn't seem like real beings. Maybe calling them stereotyped versions of themselves is too strong, but maybe not.
I really wanted to like this. Maybe reading more Woolf or Eliot would get me to see this differently. Sad.
I did find myself wanting a whole book of just Antonia's life. She seemed the most developed, the most human.
But this was dreadful. There was so much talk of poetry among the central characters and yet this book was so clinical, so unpoetic. It was unfocused and confusing and boring, though it had so much potential. The short back cover text explained things that the book itself didn't, and it would have been harder to get through without that information.
The dialogue was smart often and funny at times (and humor writing is tough, so bonus points for that). And the writing could be detailed (see "clinical") so it was easy to visualize some scenes and characters' facial expressions.
But the explorations of sex, of race, of misogyny and patriarchy, of other oppressions, felt so, I don't know, false. They weren't actualized. They didn't lift the story, except to attempt to say, "Hey, look, I'm talking about this real stuff." It was disappointing. Kitty, Antonia and Katherine were distinct characters, but again didn't seem like real beings. Maybe calling them stereotyped versions of themselves is too strong, but maybe not.
I really wanted to like this. Maybe reading more Woolf or Eliot would get me to see this differently. Sad.
I did find myself wanting a whole book of just Antonia's life. She seemed the most developed, the most human.
October 8, 2012
This novel is exceptionally well written. The shifts in persona (for lack of a better word) are interesting and easy to follow, and the same is true of the time shifts in the narrative for each persona.
However, I liked the book less the more I read. I remained entranced with the lesbian utopian community---it's been a long time since I'd thought about separatism, and I think Monahan is right on the money with the eventual outcome. But the most well-rounded and sympathetic character is the heterosexual woman---whether she ever comes out as lesbian or bi I won't say. The Katherine persona's internal monologue becomes annoying. And we never hear what happens to the charismatic leader of the lesbian utopian community, who is not one of the Three but is a principal secondary character.
Still, there's lots here to talk about at our book club, and a literary lesbian novel that's well written (and well copy edited) is a good find.
However, I liked the book less the more I read. I remained entranced with the lesbian utopian community---it's been a long time since I'd thought about separatism, and I think Monahan is right on the money with the eventual outcome. But the most well-rounded and sympathetic character is the heterosexual woman---whether she ever comes out as lesbian or bi I won't say. The Katherine persona's internal monologue becomes annoying. And we never hear what happens to the charismatic leader of the lesbian utopian community, who is not one of the Three but is a principal secondary character.
Still, there's lots here to talk about at our book club, and a literary lesbian novel that's well written (and well copy edited) is a good find.
October 21, 2014
A very very very nice book.
Sometimes you need a book that is not just easy reading but challenges you to think things over or to visualize future. I can't specifically point the thing I liked so much about it but I did. To me it is a mix between funny, sad and very serious, between prose and poetry.
I will now read one other book and then I'll pick "Three" up again being sure I will discover many new things.
10-2014 : re-reading the book and it's even better that the first read. So I'll add a star in my rating !
I am sure that in some given time there will be a third read. It got me hooked.
Super-reading !
Sometimes you need a book that is not just easy reading but challenges you to think things over or to visualize future. I can't specifically point the thing I liked so much about it but I did. To me it is a mix between funny, sad and very serious, between prose and poetry.
I will now read one other book and then I'll pick "Three" up again being sure I will discover many new things.
10-2014 : re-reading the book and it's even better that the first read. So I'll add a star in my rating !
I am sure that in some given time there will be a third read. It got me hooked.
Super-reading !
Read
February 5, 2016Three tells the tale of selection and the parameters of what could be possible in choosing different paths. Not my favorite type of novel as I didn't find that the stories came together enough. However, I could appreciate it--inventive--i.e. coven of witches, the establishment and the disintegration of Atlantis on the oil platform, and the telephone psychic.
January 25, 2016
This novel is definitely innovative in its approach. The three man characters allow Monahan to vary her narrative style and in fact some passages read more like poetry than prose. Very interesting.
Read
December 9, 2016Fiction M7347t 2012
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