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My Lesbian Novel

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In both her writing and her visual art, Renee Gladman is a brilliant investigator of life, always pushing into new ways of experiencing the world. My Lesbian Novel is a book of candor, wryness, and wit but also warmth and circumspection. Written as an interview that spans many years and weaves into and out of memory and fiction, the book chronicles the author’s—or “author’s”—project to explore the genre of lesbian romance as both a reader and a writer. The result is a playful philosophical novel about writing a romantic erotic novel, and about all the beautiful and thorny life that happens along the way.

152 pages, Paperback

First published September 3, 2023

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About the author

Renee Gladman

31 books246 followers
Renee Gladman is an artist preoccupied with crossings, thresholds, and geographies as they play out at the intersections of writing, drawing and architecture. She is the author of numerous published works, including a cycle of novels about the city-state Ravicka and its inhabitants, the Ravickians—Event Factory (2010), The Ravickians (2011), Ana Patova Crosses a Bridge (2013), and Houses of Ravicka (2017)—all published by Dorothy. Her most recent books are My Lesbian Novel (2024) and a reprint of her 2008 book TOAF (both also from Dorothy). Recent essays and visual work have appeared in The Architectural Review, POETRY, The Paris Review, The Yale Review, and e-flux, in addition to several artist monographs and exhibition catalogs. Gladman’s first solo exhibition of drawings, The Dreams of Sentences, opened in fall 2022 at Wesleyan University, followed by Narratives of Magnitude at Artists Space in New York City in spring 2023. She has been awarded fellowships and artist residencies from the Menil Drawing Institute, Harvard Radcliffe Institute, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, among others, and received a Windham-Campbell prize in fiction in 2021. She makes her home in New England.

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5 stars
243 (30%)
4 stars
317 (39%)
3 stars
176 (21%)
2 stars
56 (6%)
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18 (2%)
Displaying 1 - 30 of 232 reviews
Profile Image for Alwynne.
951 reviews1,659 followers
October 10, 2024
A difficult piece to pin down, artist and writer Renee Gladman’s dubbed this a mix of autobiography and fiction, it’s also been labelled an ‘annotated romance.’ All of which apply. It’s structured in the form of an interview or ongoing dialogue, between a writer named R and I, her interviewer. R’s a novelist known for experimental work, she’s avoided anything obviously genre-related or fiction that can be neatly categorised. But suddenly she’s overwhelmed by a desire to produce a lesbian romance. Trump’s in power, R’s desperate for a safe space to retreat into. But when she samples a range of lesbian fiction, she’s shocked that so much of what she tries ends badly, these aren’t the “sexy” or “funny” pieces she’d hoped for – it’s only later she discovers the brand of lesbian love story that guarantees a happy-ever-after.

What follows is a richly-inventive series of reflections on lesbian romance, its tropes, its conventions and its writers. These are interwoven with tantalising glimpses of R’s relationship with Danielle – a version of Danielle Vogel, Gladman’s real-life partner. And these in turn are interrupted by sections taken from R’s slowly unfolding romance narrative, a piece she abandons but eventually returns to after many years. It’s a love story tracing the growing connection between architect and New Yorker June and enigmatic Brit artist Thena. But creating June and Thena raises other issues around representation, for example, how should/does June connect to Gladman’s identity as a queer, Black author? Then around process and narrative itself, not to mention readers’ expectations. What should/shouldn’t R consider from her world-building to how she constructs a sex scene? All of which forces R to confront what it is to be a writer, to interrogate her entire process. The end result’s surprisingly compelling, sophisticated, insightful and never less than thought-provoking.
Profile Image for michelle.
235 reviews312 followers
September 15, 2024
wow!!! i honestly can say i've never read anything like this before. did i *love* all of it? i don't know! did it make me think about art and narrative in a new way? sure! did one part of the book make me super horny? yeah!

thanks to dorothy project for the finished copy, they're quickly becoming my favorite indie press <3
Profile Image for Devon  :~).
126 reviews2 followers
February 12, 2025
I really found the premise of this intriguing but I didn’t really find the author’s metatexual dialog about her own writing to be all the interesting or profound. I found myself craving the novel and story every time the interviews started back up. Basically, I wish I had enjoyed this more

As an example of my frustration with this novel I want to link a quote I had a lot of thoughts on: https://www.goodreads.com/notes/20331...
Profile Image for Jacob Wren.
Author 15 books422 followers
September 19, 2024
Some short passages from My Lesbian Novel:


*


I find it hard to pretend like something is happening all the time. I resist, in fiction, the notion that you must write the boring stuff to make the parts you’re excited to write about more believable. If something makes you go dim, I think you should avoid it.


*


But I want to be a kind of reader as I write. That means not knowing what’s up ahead.


*


I learned how much people who are not writing experimental novels have their characters eat pizza and watch TV.


*


Did I say that a large majority of books in the lesbian romance genre are poorly written? This is the case for hetero and other queer romances, too. It’s an asshole thing to say but no less true. The genre does not regard language as a living force, as an inhabitable space, a space for encounter. Rather, each sentence tends to be treated as if it were a sharp-edged container with one function. Like: point. Or: explain. Or: dramatize. It goes: “Lucy opened the refrigerator.” “I drove home.” “We looked at each other with heat in our eyes.” “Doug nodded.” “Bess was puzzled.” “After everything that happened yesterday, Morgan knew what she needed to do.” In a way, these are the sentences we live with. Maybe we don’t say them, but this is what we’re acting out all day, and someone had the bright idea, yes, let’s use these sentences for writing. Conversely, though, literary fiction is bad with love. Very very bad. Like ugh, could this be any more devastating, any heavier or more hopeless? I do it too. I leave my characters sitting on hilltops for all eternity. I have them being swept out of a familiar world into an unknown and dangerous one. People walking the streets desperately alone, fleeing a crisis they can’t even see. So… yeah… could I write something that made people feel good – women, I guess, or people who were excited to see women fall for each other – and could the language have some aliveness to it? Be porous? Be responsive? Make atmospheres?


*


When people start acting stupid I usually stop reading. Those people aren’t ready to be characters yet. You can’t have just any figment be a character. They should have to pass a test.


*
Profile Image for Bill Hsu.
1,012 reviews225 followers
February 9, 2026
I really appreciate Gladman's commitment to incompleteness and ambiguity, so this was hugely enjoyable. Most of it is taken up by conversations between two characters, I and R (haha). So it's hard not to read this as at least somewhat autobiographical. The meta-novel sections are (not surprisingly) thoughtful, nuanced, and self-aware. I even enjoyed the relatively brief lesbian romance sections, and I'm not a lesbian.

Of course I love the section where R complains about writing that lays out in detail opening the refrigerator door, removing the dish with the chicken, placing it on the table, etc etc:
I mean, the one thing I can picture in my life is pulling shit out of the fridge. Sorry about the rant... what I'm trying to say is I think people justify that kind of narration by saying "I'm building the scene" or "This is backstory" or "I want to give you something to see". But I neither want to read these actions in other people's books nor write them in my own.


So next time you get tired of me complaining about something similar, just remember, Renee Gladman agrees with me.

The final section, assuming one is allowed to read it as auto-fiction, is charming and vulnerable:
It's terribly sentimental, isn't it? How will I live down exposing this utter need I have for lesbian love scenes? But, look, it's so big it's totally spilled over into my literary life. Made a mess of my autobiography.


Heh. Heh.
Profile Image for Paul Dembina.
710 reviews168 followers
September 17, 2025
I really wanted to rate this higher. I liked the conceit of Gladman being interviewed in the book about a Lesbian romance she's writing, alternating with extracts from the ongoing said romance.

But in the end I found the romance part a bit clichéd by the end and the interview portions would probably appeal more to other writers.
Profile Image for Hannah.
197 reviews8 followers
January 29, 2026
“Do I need someone to be other with?” “It’s hard to write this way. To write wanting to say something. Or… rather, to write wanting to produce something in particular.”

I’m kind of obsessed with the way Gladman’s brain works and I think we must have a very aligned relationship towards writing
Profile Image for Babak.
Author 3 books125 followers
Read
November 1, 2024
“What I'm trying to say is I think people justify that kind
of narration by saying ‘I'm building the scene’ or ‘This is backstory’ or ‘ I want to give you something to see.’ But I neither want to read these actions in other people's books nor write them in my own.”
Profile Image for daph pink ♡ .
1,317 reviews3,317 followers
January 18, 2026
My Lesbian Novel is a book that thinks—sometimes beautifully, sometimes obsessively—about what it means to write a novel at all, and more specifically, what it might mean to write a lesbian romance without surrendering to the familiar machinery of plot. Renee Gladman approaches this question through a self-conscious, interview-style structure that places process over product, reflection over resolution.

At its best, the novel is intellectually bracing. Gladman’s attention to language, time, and desire is precise and often luminous. The book is less interested in what happens than in how attention shifts—how desire intrudes, how relationships quietly dissolve, how thought loops and resists straight lines. June’s slow estrangement from her male partner and her growing fixation on Thena are rendered not as dramatic turns but as internal reorientations, which feels honest and conceptually coherent with Gladman’s broader aesthetic.

That said, the novel’s commitment to meta-reflection can also be its limitation. The constant interrogation of form, genre, and narrative necessity sometimes stalls momentum rather than deepening it. While the refusal of conventional scene-building is clearly intentional, it can leave the reader feeling held at a conceptual distance—more like a witness to the author’s thinking than a participant in the emotional life of the story. The interview framework, clever as it is, occasionally begins to feel overdetermined, as if the book doesn’t fully trust itself to simply be.

The erotic and romantic elements, though striking when they appear, are deliberately fragmentary. This will feel refreshing to readers interested in queering narrative expectation, but frustrating to those hoping for sustained intimacy or emotional payoff. The novel gestures toward romance more than it inhabits it, prioritizing the ethics and difficulty of representation over satisfaction.

Ultimately, My Lesbian Novel is a thoughtful, self-aware, and sometimes moving work that will resonate most with readers who enjoy experimental fiction and process-driven narratives. It doesn’t quite cohere into the emotionally immersive experience it seems to want to become, but its intelligence, formal rigor, and moments of genuine insight make it worth engaging with—even when it resists pleasure.

Final rating: 3.5 stars
Ambitious, cerebral, and quietly provocative, but more compelling as a meditation on writing and desire than as a novel one fully lives inside.
Profile Image for Dani.
53 reviews7 followers
March 16, 2025
okay actually deeply obsessed with this one more than I expected to be
Profile Image for Veronica Ciastko.
113 reviews6 followers
February 12, 2025
3.5 stars. I found the novel within the novel to be uninteresting and slightly annoying, but there were some fascinating insights about writing, and Gladman articulates what I don't like about Sally Rooney novels:

"I don't care I hate it. When people start acting stupid I usually stop reading. Those people aren't ready to be characters yet. You can't have just any figment be a character. They should have to pass a test." (98)

"When you're reading for comfort, you are somewhat vulnerable to the whims of any given author, to their sense of ethics, their preference for or avoidance of misunderstands or the three-quarters-way-through breakup. There is something about where I am in my life and how the world feels to me that I need to know where I'm going when I enter a book. I don't even watch TV anymore, other than certain episodes of Columbo. My heart can't take it. Everything is too devastating. [...] This doesn't mean I don't want to have an emotional experience; I just don't want to be wrung out because two people don't have enough respect for themselves and those around them to act bravely, or at least to feel remorse when they don't." (100)
Profile Image for Zinnia Finn.
16 reviews
June 19, 2025
“I feel like I'm confessing something, but it's more like confessing placeholders for secrets because I really don't feel that I have any.”

the romance genre is a hard sell for me. this book was an easy sell for me once i saw katie gavin and lucy dacus were reading it. we got so few morsels of the main story and yet somehow i was able to picture the characters and get invested in their love. i also appreciated how gladman spoke about writing—for me, a hallmark of a good book is a book that makes me want to write, and this was one of those.

last night, a conversation with emily outside book club bar—on writing and story and plot. i strongly believe that similar to how humans have face pareidolia, we also have a knack for storytelling as a way to make sense of the world. we only need the starting points to construct a tale of our own, filling in gaps and smoothing down edges until the narrative feels feasible. i like how this book spoke to plot and scenes or lack thereof, and what constitutes a novel. if i was describing this book i would say it is about memory and the artistic process more than anything, with an inner story—second notebook—of a lesbian novel.
Profile Image for Mia.
129 reviews40 followers
January 3, 2025
unlike anything i have ever read. so fun and smart and utterly delightful
Profile Image for Anne Hartley Pfohl.
386 reviews6 followers
July 22, 2024
DNF 65%. I tried. I really did. The kind of "literary" fiction I really don't enjoy. An author being interviewed about the "lesbian novel" she's writing. The ARC was poorly organized and disjointed. Some sections were in red, some in black. I'd be reading a statement by the interviewer followed by a sentence fragment that led into a whole paragraph in the author's voice. Then I'd find the beginning of that paragraph in red two pages later. I just dont want to have to work that hard. Even if it's an "opportunity" to observe someone's "process" it's just exhausting. And too self-involved for my taste. The author appears to read from or tell the novel during the interview. And the "novel" was full of people I didn't care about with names like June, Ellis, Esther, Thena, and Marcel. I'm a simple girl. I just like a good story. This ain't that.
Profile Image for Hannah B:).
53 reviews
January 31, 2025
definitely haven’t read anything like this before. i can’t tell if that’s good or bad.
imagine you dreamt up a conversation between you and someone who’s very interested in your work, helping you write a book….. that’s what this is

a little pretentious and didn’t give that much insight into the topic of “writing and writing lesbian romances” which was the whole point?
Profile Image for Sofia.
108 reviews5 followers
April 10, 2025
Beautiful. Makes me want to write really badly. And be a better person. Never have read anything remotely like this
Profile Image for Leonie.
199 reviews
August 27, 2025
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Renee Gladman’s My Lesbian Novel is unlike anything I’ve read before. Structured in part as a fictional narrative and in part as a kind of author interview, the book continually blurs the line.
That interplay creates a fascinating tension: sometimes we’re in the realm of pure fiction - the story of June and Thena - other times it feels like we’re listening to Gladman herself in conversation, unraveling the act of writing.

What I loved most is how the interview sections carry the intimacy of an artist speaking candidly about her process, yet they’re wrapped in the same playfulness and ambiguity as the fiction. It becomes impossible (in the best way) to separate the writer from the character, or the “real” from the “imagined” in a way.

It’s an unusual as well as compelling structure that makes for a truly interesting read. Gladman’s language is sharp, inventive, and deeply engaging, exactly the kind of writing that stays with you long after you close the book.

While the structure may challenge some readers, I found it rewarding and will definitely be recommending it. A solid 4 stars.
Profile Image for geo.
172 reviews
June 13, 2025
i oscillated between 3 stars and 5 stars for quite a while and i landed on 5 but i honestly have less than zero idea how to quantify my experience with this. a little bit of hey wtf just happened there + a little bit of wow i want a whole lot more of that + a good helping of my brain is a melting ice cube
Profile Image for Brendan McHugh.
19 reviews1 follower
October 12, 2024
I loved this book and its many layers and interruptions and digressions and steaminess.
Profile Image for Ben.
25 reviews
March 22, 2025
cute and experimental! has me thinking a lot about the craft
Profile Image for Christina Mann.
50 reviews
June 9, 2025
3,5 sterne
sehr interessante narrative und einblicke in schreibprozesse, die story an sich lost me at some points aber durch die ganzen erklärungen halt auch nicht
Profile Image for dominique.
41 reviews13 followers
June 10, 2025
such a rich reflection on lesbian romance, the common tropes and conventions in the genre, and its writers! there’s this one particular quote that stuck with me, as it often conveys how i feel about miscommunication in third-act conflicts:⁠

“there is something about where i am in my life and how the world feels to me that i need to know where i’m going... my heart can’t take it. everything is too devastating... this doesn’t mean that i don’t want to have an emotional experience; i just don’t want to be wrung out because two people don’t have enough respect for themselves and those around them to act bravely, or at least to feel remorse when they don’t.”⁠

i don’t read a lot of autofiction, so this was definitely a new experience for me. gladman’s prose is compelling, sophisticated, insightful, and thought-provoking. because it’s experimental, there were some bits that i didn’t jive with, but as a whole, it made me think about the art of constructing a narrative in a new way.⁠
Profile Image for Racheal.
353 reviews7 followers
January 31, 2025
I was immediately drawn to some beautifully written things, but it took me until about halfway through to want to devour this.

Such a unique book that has actually something I hate, a book in a book. And yet… here I am loving it!

I would recommend this mostly to writers, I feel like I learned so much and am better for it. So many things to ponder…

I also enjoyed the genuine love and honest critiques of the romance genre as a whole. Valid!!!!

“I’m not really sure why we’re so in favor of showing over telling. Isn’t it refreshing to just hear how things are without having to endure them?”
Profile Image for Zoee.Net84.
42 reviews4 followers
January 6, 2025
this book made new neural pathways in my brain
Profile Image for Jaclyn.
Author 56 books813 followers
Read
March 29, 2025
Auto-fiction within auto-fiction within auto-fiction. Sometimes you need to read an experimental novel playing with form to remind yourself just how cool fiction is and what can be done with it. I tried to watch contemporary television last week (Severance) and I honestly do not get why it’s such a dominant form of entertainment. Fiction is the form for me.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 232 reviews

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