Fuck Me Judith

by Claire Star Finch

A groundbreaking, anachronistic experiment in literature informed by the countertraditions of New Narrative and queer writing

Judith, an academic celebrity, and Wendy, a slightly less famous academic celebrity, fall in love. They break up. In her ensuing grief, Wendy finds herself in a pornographic, epistolary haze that slumps toward the narrative. Fueled by the only things that cut through the pain―sex and democratic theory―Wendy takes us along on her wild ride toward self-actualization. In Claire Star Finch’s first novel, love and the void question each other in action.

174 pages, Paperback

Published September 9, 2025

Reviews

[Rebecca · Rating 5 out of 5]

HOW AM I THE FIRST PERSON REVIEWING THIS?

The prose in this one blew me away so much that often times while reading it, I had to set it down and just sit with the feelings. I want to write a review that this book deserves but I need to sit with it a little longer I think.

[Lars Meijer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Heel erg slim, heel erg grappig: 'Is this love? We haven't even talked about our struggles with the constantly doubled and (im)possibly non-logical logic of a deconstructive approach, or about whether she believes in a kind of materialism that is based in sensation or practice. We mostly just watch TV and have sex.'

[Crystal Odelle · Rating 5 out of 5]

Funny, sexy, deep—a brilliant novel. More please? <3

[Audrey Hunter · Rating 3 out of 5]

the whole thing is just a lot of academic language and REALLY intense sex scenes. its another book i am too stupid for. i felt like nothing was gained the entire time but i think that's just because, as i mentioned, i'm too stupid for this book.

[Clara Martin]

"Any hand possesses its own architectural inevitabilities that turn it into a nubbed fucking apparatus that can only be felt and experienced, never really named or reduced to the bareness of its alleged primary function. Over drinks with the dyke syndicalists in Arles we laugh about the total and true nudity of our hands. If you're really into hand penetration, it seems almost insane that people just wear their hands so nonchalantly."

"It's a kind of luxury to have a form that you can riff off of in the first place, to be able to write experimental forms that are nonetheless critically recognizable to the reigning straight cismac avant-garde and its historical manifestations which are still somehow perceived as central. But I, too, used to identify as straight. I became a dyke at 27, meaning I also come from formal privilege, so when I have sex now, I know exactly what formal choices I'm working against."

"'Are you a top or a bottom?' This seems like a line invented uniquely for plot purposes, slightly sensational and also of a curious temporal grammar, dating this writing to one of the cultural moments where the semantics of topping and bottoming have been reappropriated (again) before it is decided (again) that such determined roles limit still-unexplored potentialities of our multivalent bodies."

[Katherine Chittenden · Rating 4 out of 5]

My big genius brain: big words, lesbian sex, and political philosophy. That’s it.

[Sarah Skoric · Rating 4 out of 5]

ja wel goed vind ik. expliciet, rauw, mijmerend, goed taalfebruik, mooie scènes, verdwaald hoofdpersonage - lees ik graag nog eens opnieuw om de details meer op te nemen

[Joshua Jones · Rating 2 out of 5]

Undoubtedly satirical, I spent much of my time reading this wondering to what extent the book is consciously or unconsciously a, if not the, butt(ler) of its own joke. Invested academics being an especially abominable clump, and humanities academia being one of the most fundamentally dishonest professions imaginable, vapidly and pointlessly obsessed with copey legitimation on the mirage tropes of “potentiality,” “new worlds/ways/etc,” “the political,” this book astutely skewers such premises while remaining, it seems, thoroughly invested in their viability—as if auto-fiction, however ironized, can, through chortles of sharp, quasi-detached wit, reinvest deeply losery institutional lives with affective and thus significant politicality: a pseudo-critical critique of the academic feeling of “feeling political” while being generically bourgeois and individualist.

Anyway, this book has fleeting glimmers of brilliance, notably when it takes the above (and other adjacent) premises and burns with them for fuel, interrogating its own crevices and holes and fuckery in ways that strain for a point at which “we” can just be “explicit.” But then inevitably it flumps back into the accumulating tedium of its regurgitative fuck litany. It’s a grad student’s cannibalistic orgy at queer theory’s professionally neutered limits, mockery as melancholy, high on its own cut supply, the same joke told over and over again until you realize it wasn’t funny to begin with.

[cam · Rating 4 out of 5]

Le décalage entre les passages de sexe lesbien hard et les références à la philosophie politique qui s'enchaînent paragraphe après paragraphe m'ont fait trop rire, bien sûr c'est une prose dense du coup, avec une dimension presque académique, ça le rend un peu inaccessible sans doute et il faut aimer ça, moi j'ai kiffé

[sofia bessette · Rating 3 out of 5]

beautiful prose , very NSFW

[Danielle · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wendy finds herself in the fucking-the-pain-away stage of grief post breakup and reveals all the sordid details.