The Girl with the Black Lipstick

by Mary Biddinger

Against the backdrop of a boozy, restless late-90s Chicago, creative writing graduate student Mary Van Pelt and her eccentric roommate navigate the collision between party life, domestic harmony, and academic ambition in The Girl with the Black Lipstick. Mary Biddinger’s novella in linked flash stories conjures outrageous fashion and the oddest of odd jobs, sparing no detail when immersing readers in bedrooms, dancefloors, lakeshore beaches, and university seminars.

Set before smartphones filled every pocket, The Girl with the Black Lipstick chronicles a bygone era of performance and spectacle. Biddinger offers vivid, surreal vignettes told in the heat of the moment or recalled as we follow Van Pelt from her first days of graduate school into life as a tenured professor. Our heroine and her roommate overcome predicaments and deepen their bond while simultaneously ignoring and obsessing over the future, blissfully unaware of challenges ahead until those challenges arrive. The Girl with the Black Lipstick is a tale of deep creativity and found family, paying tribute to those who support our youthful selves in unexpected ways.

Genres: Fiction

118 pages, Paperback

Published July 8, 2025

About the author

Mary Biddinger is a poet and flash fiction writer who lives in Akron, Ohio. Her novella-in-flash, The Girl with the Black Lipstick, was published by Black Lawrence Press in July 2025. She is co-editor, with Julie Brooks Barbour, of A Mollusk Without a Shell: Essays on Self-Care for Writers (University of Akron Press, 2024). Biddinger teaches literature and creative writing at the University of Akron and in the NEOMFA program.

Reviews

[Julie · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautiful novella full of wonderful 90’s detail. A highly enjoyable read!

[Katherine D. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fluid prose, and hilarious character studies. And such a time capsule

[Andrew · Rating 1 out of 5]

This used to be ALL orange groves, far as the eye could see!!! This collection of 1-3 page short stories about a young woman in the late 90's is so aimless and uninteresting, and on top of that, the author/character (it's pretty obvious this is auto-fiction) consistently has this air of a 70 year old woman preaching about the days of yore to teenagers, as if the 90's were so long ago that all you had to do for fun was push a hoop with a stick down an old dirt road. I LIKE stories about people just existing, little vignettes of life, stories of the 90's, so I thought this was going to be right up my alley. Unfortunately it read as a whole lot of nothing.