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Zipper Mouth
In this extraordinary novel, Laurie Weeks captures the exuberance and mortification of a lesbian junkie as she navigates the chaos and horror of everyday life. Through longing monologues to Vivian Leigh, ranting letters to Sylvia Plath and to-do lists that never get done, Zipper Mouth gives us an unforgettable protagonist caught in a spiral of addiction, unrequited love, and mental health crises, and the effortlessly hilarious and strange inner workings of her mind. A messy and raw depiction of striving to live in a world that doesn't cater to your brain chemistry, Zipper Mouth is an outstanding work of queer fiction. Come for the exalted nightclub epiphanies, stay for the devastating morning-after hangovers.
170 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 2010
39 people are currently reading
2059 people want to read
About the author
Laurie Weeks
8 books50 followersLaurie Weeks is a writer, performer, artist and teacher. Her critically acclaimed first novel, Zipper Mouth, was published by The Feminist Press in 2011 and was honored with the International Lambda Literary Award for Best Lesbian Debut Novel, and was among five shortlisted for Triangle Publishing’s Edmund White Award for Best Debut Novel. Zipper Mouth appeared on numerous “Most Notable” and “Top 10” book lists for 2011 and 2012, and a German edition is forthcoming. A Turkish translation appeared in 2015. A portion of this novel appeared in 2008 in Dave Eggers' yearly anthology, The Best American Nonrequired Reading. Weeks is among the names shouted-out in Le Tigre’s hit single, Hot Topic, and in 1999 she toured the country with Sister Spit, an assemblage of post-punk performers led by Michelle Tea.
Weeks was a contributing screenwriter on the film Boys Don’t Cry. Her fiction, essays, interviews and collaborations with visual artists have appeared in the US and Europe in, to name a few: Pussy Riot! A Punk Prayer for Freedom; Vice; Whitney Biennial 2012; Nest: A Quarterly of Interiors; The Baffler; Index; Movement Research Performance Journal; LA Weekly; Fetish: An Anthology of Fetish Fiction; FELIX: A Journal of Media Arts and Communication; Art on Paper; Nobodaddies; and numerous blogs.
Weeks’ story Debbie’s Barium Swallow is featured in Semiotext(e)’s award-winning bestseller The New Fuck You: An Anthology of Lesbian Writing, a lineup of work that includes Sapphire and Dodie Bellamy. Edited by Eileen Myles and Liz Kotz in 1996, TNFU is now in its fourth printing.
Another popular piece, Nacho From The Edge, is printed in Cookin’ With Honey: What Literary Lesbians Eat, edited by Amy Scholder for Firebrand Books.
Weeks has read and performed widely in downtown NYC venues including P.S. 122, The Kitchen, Pyramid Club, LaMama and Jackie 60. In 2006 Weeks directed the original incarnation of Hell, an opera by Eileen Myles and composer Michael Webster, staged in Tijuana, Mexico, L.A. (The Red Cap) and St. Mark’s Poetry Project. She also wrote, directed, and performed in Young Skulls II, a short play loosely based on a true-crime murder by teenage lesbian thrill-killers, which was staged at the WOW Café in NY and in San Francisco at The Lab. The piece originated from Summer of Bad Plays, a long-running series produced irregularly in downtown nightclubs and lofts, co-founded by Weeks in collaboration with a loose collective that includes legendary filmmaker Charles Atlas and performance artists Anne Iobst and Lucy Sexton of “DanceNoise,” Tom Murrin, aka “The Alien Comic,” Hapi Phace, Mike Iveson and David Ilku, to name but a few.
In addition to live performance, Weeks has appeared in several videos by Cecilia Dougherty; most notably she played the role of Lance Loud in Dougherty’s feature-length video Gone, a reinterpretation of the 70s PBS reality show An American Family. She was also the subject of a 1998 video portrait by Dougherty.
She was the recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts literary grant, and was awarded a 7-month fellowship to the Fine Arts Workshop in Provincetown, MA. She has also attended residencies at The Edward Albee Foundation on Montauk, Long Island, and the Millay Colony.
She received her M.A. in Performance Studies from New York University, where she studied under cultural anthropologist Michael Taussig. Her focus was literature, social engineering, and the use of language as an instrument of violence against bodies and the imagination.
She has been a panelist and presenter at numerous academic conferences—among them Columbia, Brown, Brandeis and Kent State Universities as well as the University of California at San Diego.
Weeks was a contributing screenwriter on the film Boys Don’t Cry. Her fiction, essays, interviews and collaborations with visual artists have appeared in the US and Europe in, to name a few: Pussy Riot! A Punk Prayer for Freedom; Vice; Whitney Biennial 2012; Nest: A Quarterly of Interiors; The Baffler; Index; Movement Research Performance Journal; LA Weekly; Fetish: An Anthology of Fetish Fiction; FELIX: A Journal of Media Arts and Communication; Art on Paper; Nobodaddies; and numerous blogs.
Weeks’ story Debbie’s Barium Swallow is featured in Semiotext(e)’s award-winning bestseller The New Fuck You: An Anthology of Lesbian Writing, a lineup of work that includes Sapphire and Dodie Bellamy. Edited by Eileen Myles and Liz Kotz in 1996, TNFU is now in its fourth printing.
Another popular piece, Nacho From The Edge, is printed in Cookin’ With Honey: What Literary Lesbians Eat, edited by Amy Scholder for Firebrand Books.
Weeks has read and performed widely in downtown NYC venues including P.S. 122, The Kitchen, Pyramid Club, LaMama and Jackie 60. In 2006 Weeks directed the original incarnation of Hell, an opera by Eileen Myles and composer Michael Webster, staged in Tijuana, Mexico, L.A. (The Red Cap) and St. Mark’s Poetry Project. She also wrote, directed, and performed in Young Skulls II, a short play loosely based on a true-crime murder by teenage lesbian thrill-killers, which was staged at the WOW Café in NY and in San Francisco at The Lab. The piece originated from Summer of Bad Plays, a long-running series produced irregularly in downtown nightclubs and lofts, co-founded by Weeks in collaboration with a loose collective that includes legendary filmmaker Charles Atlas and performance artists Anne Iobst and Lucy Sexton of “DanceNoise,” Tom Murrin, aka “The Alien Comic,” Hapi Phace, Mike Iveson and David Ilku, to name but a few.
In addition to live performance, Weeks has appeared in several videos by Cecilia Dougherty; most notably she played the role of Lance Loud in Dougherty’s feature-length video Gone, a reinterpretation of the 70s PBS reality show An American Family. She was also the subject of a 1998 video portrait by Dougherty.
She was the recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts literary grant, and was awarded a 7-month fellowship to the Fine Arts Workshop in Provincetown, MA. She has also attended residencies at The Edward Albee Foundation on Montauk, Long Island, and the Millay Colony.
She received her M.A. in Performance Studies from New York University, where she studied under cultural anthropologist Michael Taussig. Her focus was literature, social engineering, and the use of language as an instrument of violence against bodies and the imagination.
She has been a panelist and presenter at numerous academic conferences—among them Columbia, Brown, Brandeis and Kent State Universities as well as the University of California at San Diego.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 118 reviews
April 28, 2012
Now that I’ve discovered Feminist Press, theres no going back. And Laurie Weeks: well, Laurie, if you’re listening, lets talk. You want to know what chemical floodgate a color opens in your mind? We can postulate. Or just posteurate. Posteurop-ate if you like, look at the sky together which is the color of your LATE CAPITALIST RAGE, but also the chromatic aftertaste of my de-raged capital. N*raged is capital, but only if you have it. I think. Which I don’t. because I can’t capitalize.
Prozac, Tegretol,Xanax, Ritalin, heroin, cocaine, alcohol and fags (of every kind), copious vomiting : did I miss something? Apart from a few days here and there, I mean, in between binges. Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do on the Lower East Side if its the 1990s? Plug a hole, any hole.
And giving up: what exquisite Chinese torture: Giving up is the gift that keeps on giving, because of course, tomorrow never comes. Laurie, can we just give up giving up, finally, once and for all?
Sugar coated with paranoia, depression, addiction, bi-polarity, bi-sexuality, but never bipartisan.
Raw, potent, witty, a write that goes straight for the jugular.
Prozac, Tegretol,Xanax, Ritalin, heroin, cocaine, alcohol and fags (of every kind), copious vomiting : did I miss something? Apart from a few days here and there, I mean, in between binges. Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do on the Lower East Side if its the 1990s? Plug a hole, any hole.
And giving up: what exquisite Chinese torture: Giving up is the gift that keeps on giving, because of course, tomorrow never comes. Laurie, can we just give up giving up, finally, once and for all?
Sugar coated with paranoia, depression, addiction, bi-polarity, bi-sexuality, but never bipartisan.
Raw, potent, witty, a write that goes straight for the jugular.
February 2, 2014
pre-read: 80s punk grrl, previously published in Vice, and rec'd by Dave Eggers? Done.
mid-read: This book really should have been amazing but it is taking a supreme force of will to finish it. It's really overwritten and super angsty and self-pitying and druggy and thwarted-desire-filled. I know these are usually things I love, but it's just not coming together for me here.
I had lunch with some ladies from Alloy yesterday and they gave me a copy of 666 Park Avenue ; and so now the prospect of finishing the last 30 pages of Zipper Mouth with that practically candy-coated beauty beckoning from the corner of my desk is like having to cram a bunch of eggplant and okra stew down my throat before I get any ice cream.
practically post-read: I have to admit that I am just not going to finish this book now, or maybe even ever. It's been sitting on my desk with a dozen pages left for so many months that I have absolutely no idea what's even going on. This is really so unlike me, but I'm throwing in the towel. I'll leave it on the "didn't finish -- yet" shelf, because life is long and maybe one day I'll try again, but right now I've just got to put it back on my irl bookshelf and move on.
mid-read: This book really should have been amazing but it is taking a supreme force of will to finish it. It's really overwritten and super angsty and self-pitying and druggy and thwarted-desire-filled. I know these are usually things I love, but it's just not coming together for me here.
I had lunch with some ladies from Alloy yesterday and they gave me a copy of 666 Park Avenue ; and so now the prospect of finishing the last 30 pages of Zipper Mouth with that practically candy-coated beauty beckoning from the corner of my desk is like having to cram a bunch of eggplant and okra stew down my throat before I get any ice cream.
practically post-read: I have to admit that I am just not going to finish this book now, or maybe even ever. It's been sitting on my desk with a dozen pages left for so many months that I have absolutely no idea what's even going on. This is really so unlike me, but I'm throwing in the towel. I'll leave it on the "didn't finish -- yet" shelf, because life is long and maybe one day I'll try again, but right now I've just got to put it back on my irl bookshelf and move on.
February 3, 2012
A debut novel about a troubled young women heroin (and coke, plus whatever else someone may have like, but not restricted to, speed, ritalin, xanax, meth, not so much crack though, and WAY too much wine, manhattans, vodka, and lots of pot too, and WAY too many cigs) snorter in nyc and her search for love, friends, jobs (or at least money), sex, and more drugs. But she’s not drinking anyway, or at least that’s what she says, in between hangovers. Frank and philosophical, sexy and degrading. A just lovely first novel. She had an entry In “best american nonrequired reading 2008” and Vice among other places. From The Feminist Press, so well made, edited, and grrll powered. 9780618902828
Some excerpts that don’t really reflect the novel or are super-brilliant or anything, but DO have some ‘library’ in it:
From “zipper mouth” by laurie weeks pg 80
“For years my body ambulated through the grid, chewing things up, devouring, almost always in a state of panic. Places I have gone on my own two legs, swinging them across the sidewalk, the bricks towering around me feel like they’re inside my skin, abrading me from within---is there no way out of this equation? Jane gave me a book which I haven’t read yet, but when I opened it up I saw “Deglaze with your bone water, reduce, repeat. Glutamic acid is tasteless.” Was there anything good in my desire for Jane? Was there real love? I mean, did I just want to suck her blood? Places I have gone: across the avenues to score drugs at all times of the day and nights; to work and home from work in a cab or on a bike, subway, bus; to the check-cashing place, to bookstores, thrift stores, and libraries; to get my hair cut and colored; to nightclubs and the apartments of girls I’m in live with who don’t love me back, of girls smitten with me and rejected by me, without grace. Monkeys become ducks when the Amazon floods, fish feed on fruits, river dolphins race through the treetops though yesterday their leaves brushed against the moon---that’s what I wanted to say. Crabs clacking in the canopy that yesterday soared into space, leaves rustling against the moon. Now in the crosswalk the air around me hemorrhaged neon from the skirts and blouses of the workers, lifting me on its surge. I felt nauseous. I felt faint. I wanted Jane. I wanted Jane walking beside me, chain-smoking after yoga, Jane of the striated muscles and psychotic clothing, attire of humor and madness.”
And here’s another library quote from page 98
“My balance was thirty dollars. I took it all. Swift calculations revealed that, with the cash in my pocket, I could buy three bags of dope and still have eleven dollars to survive on until my check showed up sometime next week. It’d be totally great---I’d sup sparely on noodles and salt or maybe do a fast---a Master Cleanse! Lemons and maple syrup---pennies a day. I’d smoke with restraint, do free stuff like museums and libraries---god, how excellent. I’d be like a camping monk, or a young Indian brave tracking his lost pony through a landscape of box canyons booby-trapped with the barbs of venomous populations, subsisting only on a twig and sips of water from creeks threading silverly across the mesas as the changing seasons offered fresh and increasingly refined scourges of solitude and doubt, the intrepid young seeker traversing these infernal domains immune in his loincloth, for his quest was propelled by ecstatic devotion to his best friend and spirit guide, the dappled pony, Little Paint.”
These dreamy longish paragraphs are interspersed in Week’s novel with her snorting heroin and throwing up and feeling high.
Some excerpts that don’t really reflect the novel or are super-brilliant or anything, but DO have some ‘library’ in it:
From “zipper mouth” by laurie weeks pg 80
“For years my body ambulated through the grid, chewing things up, devouring, almost always in a state of panic. Places I have gone on my own two legs, swinging them across the sidewalk, the bricks towering around me feel like they’re inside my skin, abrading me from within---is there no way out of this equation? Jane gave me a book which I haven’t read yet, but when I opened it up I saw “Deglaze with your bone water, reduce, repeat. Glutamic acid is tasteless.” Was there anything good in my desire for Jane? Was there real love? I mean, did I just want to suck her blood? Places I have gone: across the avenues to score drugs at all times of the day and nights; to work and home from work in a cab or on a bike, subway, bus; to the check-cashing place, to bookstores, thrift stores, and libraries; to get my hair cut and colored; to nightclubs and the apartments of girls I’m in live with who don’t love me back, of girls smitten with me and rejected by me, without grace. Monkeys become ducks when the Amazon floods, fish feed on fruits, river dolphins race through the treetops though yesterday their leaves brushed against the moon---that’s what I wanted to say. Crabs clacking in the canopy that yesterday soared into space, leaves rustling against the moon. Now in the crosswalk the air around me hemorrhaged neon from the skirts and blouses of the workers, lifting me on its surge. I felt nauseous. I felt faint. I wanted Jane. I wanted Jane walking beside me, chain-smoking after yoga, Jane of the striated muscles and psychotic clothing, attire of humor and madness.”
And here’s another library quote from page 98
“My balance was thirty dollars. I took it all. Swift calculations revealed that, with the cash in my pocket, I could buy three bags of dope and still have eleven dollars to survive on until my check showed up sometime next week. It’d be totally great---I’d sup sparely on noodles and salt or maybe do a fast---a Master Cleanse! Lemons and maple syrup---pennies a day. I’d smoke with restraint, do free stuff like museums and libraries---god, how excellent. I’d be like a camping monk, or a young Indian brave tracking his lost pony through a landscape of box canyons booby-trapped with the barbs of venomous populations, subsisting only on a twig and sips of water from creeks threading silverly across the mesas as the changing seasons offered fresh and increasingly refined scourges of solitude and doubt, the intrepid young seeker traversing these infernal domains immune in his loincloth, for his quest was propelled by ecstatic devotion to his best friend and spirit guide, the dappled pony, Little Paint.”
These dreamy longish paragraphs are interspersed in Week’s novel with her snorting heroin and throwing up and feeling high.
October 22, 2011
Although I loved the vivid prose ultimately Zippermouth left me unsatisfied. The novel started out strong but just kept spinning. The novel can be summarized as: drugs, flashbacks to past drug use, hangovers, withdrawals, temp jobs and yearnings for meaningful relationships that were built-up in her mind to be more than they ever could be in reality which led to rehab and then...more drugs, etc. (second verse, same as the first).
Read
October 11, 2011Excellent writing, not a wrong word or ill-constructed sentence in this short novel.
However, reading it made me feel old. I wanted to shake the self-indulgent main character while imploring her to pull her sh*t together, treat herself and those around her like humans and get back to me when you have a real story to tell. And doesn't that sound like a cranky old lady talking?
However, reading it made me feel old. I wanted to shake the self-indulgent main character while imploring her to pull her sh*t together, treat herself and those around her like humans and get back to me when you have a real story to tell. And doesn't that sound like a cranky old lady talking?
May 3, 2020
This book took me in circles, « I am non-linear too! » I especially loved how tender and sincere the writing felt. As well, it begged to be read slowly, cautiously, and over again.
Read
November 4, 2024şimdi ne diyeyim bilemedim, okunuyor okumasına ama çok az şey anlatıyor
uyuşturucunun bulandırdığı bir zihnin sayıklamaları gibi bakılabilse de bildiğin sıkıcıydı
uyuşturucunun bulandırdığı bir zihnin sayıklamaları gibi bakılabilse de bildiğin sıkıcıydı
April 14, 2021
hayat kötü kitapların tamamını okumak için çok kısa
March 26, 2018
This is one I took a complete chance on. I picked it from my stupidly huge tbr list, ignored the blurb and reviews and just went into it blind. Reasons for doing this are because sadly, I can be easily swayed by a couple of negative reviews and secondly I love the surprise element.
What a book to go in blindly to. Before I say anything though the writing in this is amazing, I fell in love with the descriptives before I even understood what was going on. I use the word understood loosely.
The story itself is very erratic, it’s surreal in parts and feels like you’re in the mc’s head on drugs with her dipping between the present, memories and fever dreams. The fact it isn’t in chapters speaks for itself. In short it consists of the ramblings of a mentally unstable young woman living in New York, yet I couldn’t stop reading. There is a story though. She’s hopelessly attracted to her best friend Jane, trying/failing to quit her heroin addiction whilst holding down a job.
It kinda reminds me of what daria would be after her high school years. Which is cool because I love daria.
I feel like any review I give on this won’t do it an ounce of justice. Everyone should go into this completely clueless as to what it’s about because it’s an absolute mind tripping delight of a read.
I’ve given the book five stars. Not because it’s a gripping storyline, because it isn’t. But because the writing style is different to anything I’ve ever read and because it’s going to take a while to get this one out of my head.
What a book to go in blindly to. Before I say anything though the writing in this is amazing, I fell in love with the descriptives before I even understood what was going on. I use the word understood loosely.
The story itself is very erratic, it’s surreal in parts and feels like you’re in the mc’s head on drugs with her dipping between the present, memories and fever dreams. The fact it isn’t in chapters speaks for itself. In short it consists of the ramblings of a mentally unstable young woman living in New York, yet I couldn’t stop reading. There is a story though. She’s hopelessly attracted to her best friend Jane, trying/failing to quit her heroin addiction whilst holding down a job.
It kinda reminds me of what daria would be after her high school years. Which is cool because I love daria.
I feel like any review I give on this won’t do it an ounce of justice. Everyone should go into this completely clueless as to what it’s about because it’s an absolute mind tripping delight of a read.
I’ve given the book five stars. Not because it’s a gripping storyline, because it isn’t. But because the writing style is different to anything I’ve ever read and because it’s going to take a while to get this one out of my head.
March 2, 2017
Hmmm I thought I would love this book more than anything and I....liked it? Or, more accurately, in rare moments I really loved it and found it the most relatable ever (like the bit about her doing laundry in a fit of 'this will be just the start of a clean new life': she brings the clean laundry back from the laundromat and throws it on her bed and maybe 2 days later puts it into piles and even though her dresser drawers are only 2 feet away, they stay there and they sort of slough off the bed onto the floor some of them and some get cat hair on them and eventually it's weeks later and all of her washed clothes have merged with the b-list 'didn't rate washing with the first group' dirty clothes so they're all basically dirty again and what was supposed to be so uplifting and "pull myself up from the muck of paralysis to cleanse and renew myself at the Lourdes of the Laundromat" just "managed to add yet more poundage to the anvil of demoralization dragging me further each day into a primal bubbling stew of self-disgust"). But then so much of it was just a gross upsetting haze of heroin addiction and general debauchery which I found weirdly hard to get through. I feel like normally drug addiction books are super upsetting and hard to read but at the same time you get that watching-a-car-crash feeling of needing to find out what terrible thing happens next, but the stream-of-consciousness-non-linear style made it just a little bit...boring?
January 26, 2013
http://wineandabook.com/2012/05/02/re...
"Outside my window it was cold, bare trees shaved in a bitter wind. Or maybe it was summer, who can know. The TV's dismal flow leaked across my sheets. Jesus, close eyes. What did the day used to be like. I drifted to a memory of a happy time when I brought home a poem in second grade about clouds. "Clouds" was misspelled: The fluffy clods are floating in the sky. My mother's loving laughter, my beautiful young mother, at the time she would've been thirty-one, her laugh a fizzy feeling, both of us dissolving into giggles, sadly ignorant of the bloody five-car pileup of life I was hurtling blissfully toward." (page 159).
I came to Zipper Mouth in a roundabout way: I was reading an awesome piece over at The Awl on the merits (and inherent problems) with author readings and book tours, and I really enjoyed reading the thoughts contributed by Laurie Weeks and Tao Lin. When I researched Weeks, I quickly found out that parts of Zipper Mouth had appeared in Dave Eggers' The Best American Nonrequired Reading, I immediately put a hold on it at the library. (Those of you who are fluent in my particular brand of literary snobbery know that I take the recommendations from "The Daves" very seriously, "The Daves" being David Foster Wallace, Dave Eggers and David Sedaris. They walk among the gods who reign supreme in my personal pantheon of prolific prose-makers). Per usual, Eggers' recommendation was spot on.
The narrator of Laurie Week's Zipper Mouth has a problem several problems:
1) She has a substance abuse problem. Her drug of choice: ALL OF THEM. Heroin, speed, coke, booze, weed, nicotine...if you can crush it, snort it, or smoke it, apparently it either has been or will be in her at some point over the course of the narrative.
2) Due to said substance abuse problem, she has an employment problem (she seems to gain and lose various temp jobs throughout the text) which, combined with the substance abuse problem, results in a financial problem that leaves her unable/almost unable to pay her rent/bills or, at one point, buy a bagel for breakfast. Her ability to stretch even the smallest amount of money while ensuring the purchase of some sort of illegal substances boggles the mind.
3) And to top if off, she has an unrequited love problem, as she's hopelessly infatuated with her best friend, Jane, a straight girl who gets high on the attention and free drugs that come with said infatuation.
Set mostly in NYC's Lower East Side, the novel itself is a nonlinear collage of images, scenes, lists, memories, amends and letters (to dead celebrities like Sylvia Plath, Vivien Leigh, and Judy Davis, and to her very much alive addict friends) that work together to create a rich, vivid picture of the narrator's life. The protagonist, though presented in a reflective yet unselfconscious and nonjudgmental manner by the author, at times seems to embody the verb "waste": she wastes her potential, her intelligence, her passions and talent; she wastes her heart on a woman who isn't going to love her in a healthy way; she is literally wasted for most of the book. As the reader (and as an overly empathetic being), I couldn't help but feel for her, to want more for her. Though flawed (and aren't we all!!), the protagonist is so warm, so genuine and funny (!!!) and unpretentious, so realistic and raw and reflective and aware that I rooted for her every step of the way. And THANK GOD that Weeks has created a piece of work that pushes the reader out of a passive comfort zone, to really feel something, even if that something is, at times, discomfort and anxiety. (sidebar: FACT: after reading the scene in which the protagonist wakes up, hungover, only to realize that she vaguely recalls she may or may not have a test that day ("What fucking test? In what banal way with nonetheless enormous consequences was I about to fuck up today?" (page64)), I woke up at 2:24am in a cold sweat and could not for the life of me fall back asleep before I had reviewed and re-reviewed my "to do" list no less that 13 times and I was reasonably sure that I hadn't dropped the ball on anything. THAT'S how much I empathized with the protagonist...I actually adopted some of her anxiety as my own. You know you have an empathy problem when you start taking on the stress of the fictitious...).
I loved Week's utilization of multiple and alternative forms for her narrative (lists, flashbacks, letters, etc). It reminded me of Jennifer Egan's A Visit From the Goon Squad in terms of how successfully utilized and how incredibly contemporary those choices felt (n.b. for those of you who haven't read A Visit From the Goon Squad yet, DO! It's phenomenal! There's an entire chapter done a as series of power-point slides that illustrates my point and, stylistically, works wonderfully!). My favorite list came on page 46:
"10 Bonus Accomplishments of Today
1. Battled Satan
2. Didn't smoke pot(so far)
3. Swept floor, tied newspapers
4. Organized four files
5. Went to work in spite of spirit being broken on Rack of Menstrual Pain
6. Ate broccoli, 'the colon's broom'
7. Endured lengthy conversation with X; faked waves of empathy
8. Didn't smoke for three hours after getting up
9. Walked to the gym instead of taking a cab
10. Celebrated diversity"
I actually do the same thing when I'm feeling especially unproductive and/or am feeling the desire to be self-congratulatory. Here's mine from today:
Jack's 10 Bonus Accomplishments of Today
1. Wrote email from bed to Marketing at 5:33am (to make up for email I forgot to send before I left work yesterday...ooops)
2. Only had 1 1/2 cans of Coke despite running on less than 5 hours sleep
3. Wrote Zipper Mouth review, which has been at the top of my "to review" pile for at least a week and a half
4. Remembered to take all 6 supplements
5. Called Mom; experienced genuine empathy
6. Remembered to ask Mom for Grandma's new email address
7. Cleaned off couch (i.e. the world's largest junk drawer)
8. Requested Pinterest invite
9. Made a dent in the dirty dishes
10. Celebrated diversity
This one was mostly self-congratulatory ;)
I would also be remiss if I didn't talk about how damn beautiful the language was! Weeks is so skilled at putting together some infuriatingly gorgeous sentences. Comme ci:
"I couldn't focus. Nicotine deprivation revealed to me what a vacuum I was, what a suction machine of need and desire. God I love everything, I thought, gazing out my window at passersby several stories below. Blossoms dripping from the trees, robins in love warbling among the peeping spring budlets, trash spilling festively from an orange dumpster...That emaciated visionary walking his mangy dogs beneath the ginko trees like he did every day in a paradigm-shattering costume of sandals and socks beneath an overstretched Speedo and bare rib cage--I worshipped him. The periwinke sky and its cloud scallops arched up from behind the jumbled gothic architecture of rooftops across the street. I loved that shade of blue, what a sharp sensation it produced in my lungs! What chemical floodgate does a color open in your mind? Love leaked from my pituitary and converted on contact with my bloodstream into panic and I was swelling up, threatening to leave the ground and float off fast. I needed a cigarette, the tap-dancing kind, three feet long." (page 48)
C'est magnifique!
Rubric rating: 8.5. Can't wait to read more from her!!!
"Outside my window it was cold, bare trees shaved in a bitter wind. Or maybe it was summer, who can know. The TV's dismal flow leaked across my sheets. Jesus, close eyes. What did the day used to be like. I drifted to a memory of a happy time when I brought home a poem in second grade about clouds. "Clouds" was misspelled: The fluffy clods are floating in the sky. My mother's loving laughter, my beautiful young mother, at the time she would've been thirty-one, her laugh a fizzy feeling, both of us dissolving into giggles, sadly ignorant of the bloody five-car pileup of life I was hurtling blissfully toward." (page 159).
I came to Zipper Mouth in a roundabout way: I was reading an awesome piece over at The Awl on the merits (and inherent problems) with author readings and book tours, and I really enjoyed reading the thoughts contributed by Laurie Weeks and Tao Lin. When I researched Weeks, I quickly found out that parts of Zipper Mouth had appeared in Dave Eggers' The Best American Nonrequired Reading, I immediately put a hold on it at the library. (Those of you who are fluent in my particular brand of literary snobbery know that I take the recommendations from "The Daves" very seriously, "The Daves" being David Foster Wallace, Dave Eggers and David Sedaris. They walk among the gods who reign supreme in my personal pantheon of prolific prose-makers). Per usual, Eggers' recommendation was spot on.
The narrator of Laurie Week's Zipper Mouth has a problem several problems:
1) She has a substance abuse problem. Her drug of choice: ALL OF THEM. Heroin, speed, coke, booze, weed, nicotine...if you can crush it, snort it, or smoke it, apparently it either has been or will be in her at some point over the course of the narrative.
2) Due to said substance abuse problem, she has an employment problem (she seems to gain and lose various temp jobs throughout the text) which, combined with the substance abuse problem, results in a financial problem that leaves her unable/almost unable to pay her rent/bills or, at one point, buy a bagel for breakfast. Her ability to stretch even the smallest amount of money while ensuring the purchase of some sort of illegal substances boggles the mind.
3) And to top if off, she has an unrequited love problem, as she's hopelessly infatuated with her best friend, Jane, a straight girl who gets high on the attention and free drugs that come with said infatuation.
Set mostly in NYC's Lower East Side, the novel itself is a nonlinear collage of images, scenes, lists, memories, amends and letters (to dead celebrities like Sylvia Plath, Vivien Leigh, and Judy Davis, and to her very much alive addict friends) that work together to create a rich, vivid picture of the narrator's life. The protagonist, though presented in a reflective yet unselfconscious and nonjudgmental manner by the author, at times seems to embody the verb "waste": she wastes her potential, her intelligence, her passions and talent; she wastes her heart on a woman who isn't going to love her in a healthy way; she is literally wasted for most of the book. As the reader (and as an overly empathetic being), I couldn't help but feel for her, to want more for her. Though flawed (and aren't we all!!), the protagonist is so warm, so genuine and funny (!!!) and unpretentious, so realistic and raw and reflective and aware that I rooted for her every step of the way. And THANK GOD that Weeks has created a piece of work that pushes the reader out of a passive comfort zone, to really feel something, even if that something is, at times, discomfort and anxiety. (sidebar: FACT: after reading the scene in which the protagonist wakes up, hungover, only to realize that she vaguely recalls she may or may not have a test that day ("What fucking test? In what banal way with nonetheless enormous consequences was I about to fuck up today?" (page64)), I woke up at 2:24am in a cold sweat and could not for the life of me fall back asleep before I had reviewed and re-reviewed my "to do" list no less that 13 times and I was reasonably sure that I hadn't dropped the ball on anything. THAT'S how much I empathized with the protagonist...I actually adopted some of her anxiety as my own. You know you have an empathy problem when you start taking on the stress of the fictitious...).
I loved Week's utilization of multiple and alternative forms for her narrative (lists, flashbacks, letters, etc). It reminded me of Jennifer Egan's A Visit From the Goon Squad in terms of how successfully utilized and how incredibly contemporary those choices felt (n.b. for those of you who haven't read A Visit From the Goon Squad yet, DO! It's phenomenal! There's an entire chapter done a as series of power-point slides that illustrates my point and, stylistically, works wonderfully!). My favorite list came on page 46:
"10 Bonus Accomplishments of Today
1. Battled Satan
2. Didn't smoke pot(so far)
3. Swept floor, tied newspapers
4. Organized four files
5. Went to work in spite of spirit being broken on Rack of Menstrual Pain
6. Ate broccoli, 'the colon's broom'
7. Endured lengthy conversation with X; faked waves of empathy
8. Didn't smoke for three hours after getting up
9. Walked to the gym instead of taking a cab
10. Celebrated diversity"
I actually do the same thing when I'm feeling especially unproductive and/or am feeling the desire to be self-congratulatory. Here's mine from today:
Jack's 10 Bonus Accomplishments of Today
1. Wrote email from bed to Marketing at 5:33am (to make up for email I forgot to send before I left work yesterday...ooops)
2. Only had 1 1/2 cans of Coke despite running on less than 5 hours sleep
3. Wrote Zipper Mouth review, which has been at the top of my "to review" pile for at least a week and a half
4. Remembered to take all 6 supplements
5. Called Mom; experienced genuine empathy
6. Remembered to ask Mom for Grandma's new email address
7. Cleaned off couch (i.e. the world's largest junk drawer)
8. Requested Pinterest invite
9. Made a dent in the dirty dishes
10. Celebrated diversity
This one was mostly self-congratulatory ;)
I would also be remiss if I didn't talk about how damn beautiful the language was! Weeks is so skilled at putting together some infuriatingly gorgeous sentences. Comme ci:
"I couldn't focus. Nicotine deprivation revealed to me what a vacuum I was, what a suction machine of need and desire. God I love everything, I thought, gazing out my window at passersby several stories below. Blossoms dripping from the trees, robins in love warbling among the peeping spring budlets, trash spilling festively from an orange dumpster...That emaciated visionary walking his mangy dogs beneath the ginko trees like he did every day in a paradigm-shattering costume of sandals and socks beneath an overstretched Speedo and bare rib cage--I worshipped him. The periwinke sky and its cloud scallops arched up from behind the jumbled gothic architecture of rooftops across the street. I loved that shade of blue, what a sharp sensation it produced in my lungs! What chemical floodgate does a color open in your mind? Love leaked from my pituitary and converted on contact with my bloodstream into panic and I was swelling up, threatening to leave the ground and float off fast. I needed a cigarette, the tap-dancing kind, three feet long." (page 48)
C'est magnifique!
Rubric rating: 8.5. Can't wait to read more from her!!!
June 24, 2024
This genre of unwashed obsessive lesbian literature will never die!!!! Seriously though this was fantastic. particularly loved the contradictions of all the different stories about her past/her present, the dishonesty and honesty, how the text kind of tripped over itself. Just really great, have been wanting to read this forever and i knew i was gonna love it
April 16, 2023
Rep: lesbian mc with substance abuse disorder
CWs: drug & alcohol abuse
CWs: drug & alcohol abuse
May 9, 2020
The body is a great thing, Judy, a horrifying thing, a great and horrifying thing to be trapped in a body, anything can go haywire at any moment.
I spent a lot of time while reading this wondering if I'm the audience for this book, or if I'm too dumb for it. I did like certain aspects of it; a queer, mentally-ill woman spins through life and temp jobs and unrequited love in a drug-soaked haze. Deals a lot with addiction and drug-use. Some passages spoke about life and self-image and mental illness with pinpoint precision that I really liked. I'd be meandering along the book, not having much idea of what was happening because the passage of time and change of locations wasn't really noted, having to reread sentences multiple times, and then something really insightful would latch on to me, or I'd see myself in a sentence, or I'd find myself highlighting stuff like mad.
But the book in its totality didn't really click for me. A lot of references that I didn't get, things I had to stop and look up, something I didn't bother with. I can enjoy stream of consciousness (which I think this attempted to be at times, and it fits, because the protag was high most of the time) but the main character's narrative would take such huge leaps ans turns, it felt more nonsensical than anything else. Sometimes I'd go over a passage multiple times and just end up with... nothing. A lot of words, sure, but basically nothing.
(Again, it could just be that I'm stupid, or not fully the intended audience.)
Interesting, at the very least.
I spent a lot of time while reading this wondering if I'm the audience for this book, or if I'm too dumb for it. I did like certain aspects of it; a queer, mentally-ill woman spins through life and temp jobs and unrequited love in a drug-soaked haze. Deals a lot with addiction and drug-use. Some passages spoke about life and self-image and mental illness with pinpoint precision that I really liked. I'd be meandering along the book, not having much idea of what was happening because the passage of time and change of locations wasn't really noted, having to reread sentences multiple times, and then something really insightful would latch on to me, or I'd see myself in a sentence, or I'd find myself highlighting stuff like mad.
But the book in its totality didn't really click for me. A lot of references that I didn't get, things I had to stop and look up, something I didn't bother with. I can enjoy stream of consciousness (which I think this attempted to be at times, and it fits, because the protag was high most of the time) but the main character's narrative would take such huge leaps ans turns, it felt more nonsensical than anything else. Sometimes I'd go over a passage multiple times and just end up with... nothing. A lot of words, sure, but basically nothing.
(Again, it could just be that I'm stupid, or not fully the intended audience.)
Interesting, at the very least.
Read
June 2, 2011So many amazing quotes it's hard to summarize -- try these:
"In one of the photos tacked up inside my teenage closet, Vivien leans into the lens and smiles, glamorous in the low-cut red velvet robe she wore in Gone With the Wind when Rhett takes her upstairs and rapes her, at which point she blossoms into the fullness of her love."
"Oh my god you just want to be the smoke pulled between her lips. What happens when you get inside a person anyway, up that close, inside their mouth? Nothing. It's like a photograph blown up. They just dissolve into a haze of black and white dots until all you have is molecules and air, nothing there."
"I bought a six-pack and soon was careening down the empty highway high as a kite, reflecting on the relevance of the Joy Division song blasting from my boom box, certain that sadness had evaporated from my body to create the supernatural light in the landscape around me. It came through the window, a strange light washing across my hands on the wheel; in my throat, a decay of filmy language and a cigarette between my lips. The blue sky beyond my windshield leaked pigment along its edges, gushed blue across the hood while withdrawing as I drove till my body was just a craving, straining to swallow something that wasn't there, like trying to lick the colors in a movie."
"In one of the photos tacked up inside my teenage closet, Vivien leans into the lens and smiles, glamorous in the low-cut red velvet robe she wore in Gone With the Wind when Rhett takes her upstairs and rapes her, at which point she blossoms into the fullness of her love."
"Oh my god you just want to be the smoke pulled between her lips. What happens when you get inside a person anyway, up that close, inside their mouth? Nothing. It's like a photograph blown up. They just dissolve into a haze of black and white dots until all you have is molecules and air, nothing there."
"I bought a six-pack and soon was careening down the empty highway high as a kite, reflecting on the relevance of the Joy Division song blasting from my boom box, certain that sadness had evaporated from my body to create the supernatural light in the landscape around me. It came through the window, a strange light washing across my hands on the wheel; in my throat, a decay of filmy language and a cigarette between my lips. The blue sky beyond my windshield leaked pigment along its edges, gushed blue across the hood while withdrawing as I drove till my body was just a craving, straining to swallow something that wasn't there, like trying to lick the colors in a movie."
February 10, 2018
maybe this sums it up....
“My desires and options are autumn leaves, their leisurely spiral erratic with updrafts and dips, teasing feints and side swirls. How tantalizing is each leaf! Yet how impossible to attend its performance all the way to the ground!” (153)
“My desires and options are autumn leaves, their leisurely spiral erratic with updrafts and dips, teasing feints and side swirls. How tantalizing is each leaf! Yet how impossible to attend its performance all the way to the ground!” (153)
July 1, 2019
Although Zipper Mouth's ending was quite abrupt, I loved every single moment leading up to it. Weeks has written a funny, poetic, relatable, and slightly tragic novel that captivated me enough to make me read through the whole thing in one evening.
January 21, 2024
no plot just vibes except the vibes are awful (positive)!! she's just like me (derogatory)!! i usually hate rambling stream of conscious downward spiral books but this one is so good. i loved it (red flag). gorgeous writing but so readable and i actually laughed out loud multiple times 10/10
May 1, 2022
2.5 ⭐️
July 19, 2023
If you want a book with a plot, character development, and chapters, this is not the book for you. Alternatively, if you want a peek into the stream of consciousness of a lonely lesbian who is never not on multiple drugs, this book IS for you.
May 20, 2024
great descriptions of longing, really strong writing, less of a true plot than I was hoping but perhaps that's my personal preference for plot-focused books. pretty cool that there's a bootleg Turkish version of this book but not sure I'd spend the time translating it into Turkish if I was fluent
April 24, 2014
A priority book I finally read this week just because its pink spine was standing out to me in a grey aisle of the university library while I was there to pick up a different book so it's like what the hell I'll read it NOW ~
Pg 82 in which Jane, the friend she is in love with, is in her bed talking about how lonely and sad she is in spite of the narrator's presence
Describing the process of doing laundry, comparing it to a desert war zone lolol
How you always forget that you need a sponge brush until the moment you're washing dishes and trying to squeeze your hand into a glass to wash the bottom (this is me right now with dishwasher liquid)
"Here, on the other hand, I had my own office and the supplies necessary to conduct my private affairs. Really, not only were things fine, they were excellent." (OFFICE JOBS)
The homeless girl who came home with her and did speed and was paranoid the whole night, making pudding and checking around the apartment to see if this person was spying on her LOL
Reading Laurie Weeks is like listening to an engaging friend who talks a bit too fast or somehow the words feel jumbled up in the mouth so that I have to clarify or ask, "what'd you say?" a lot which is the main thing that took something out of it for me
Also I love how Imogen Binnie in Nevada and Weeks here both have a "I feel like shit so I'm gonna go buy myself a bagel" or maybe it's more like, "LIFE is shitty so let me go buy myself a bagel" and this bagel, something "small" and maybe $3 is a sober reward that you don't exactly deserve to get you thru the day
I totally know that bagel reward. Yep.
Pg 82 in which Jane, the friend she is in love with, is in her bed talking about how lonely and sad she is in spite of the narrator's presence
Describing the process of doing laundry, comparing it to a desert war zone lolol
How you always forget that you need a sponge brush until the moment you're washing dishes and trying to squeeze your hand into a glass to wash the bottom (this is me right now with dishwasher liquid)
"Here, on the other hand, I had my own office and the supplies necessary to conduct my private affairs. Really, not only were things fine, they were excellent." (OFFICE JOBS)
The homeless girl who came home with her and did speed and was paranoid the whole night, making pudding and checking around the apartment to see if this person was spying on her LOL
Reading Laurie Weeks is like listening to an engaging friend who talks a bit too fast or somehow the words feel jumbled up in the mouth so that I have to clarify or ask, "what'd you say?" a lot which is the main thing that took something out of it for me
Also I love how Imogen Binnie in Nevada and Weeks here both have a "I feel like shit so I'm gonna go buy myself a bagel" or maybe it's more like, "LIFE is shitty so let me go buy myself a bagel" and this bagel, something "small" and maybe $3 is a sober reward that you don't exactly deserve to get you thru the day
I totally know that bagel reward. Yep.
August 19, 2013
What’s Going On? with. this. book! I have no idea. Bad writing is when I read it and have no idea what was on the page and don't care to reread it because it's uninteresting anyway. I close the book and have no sense of it at all other than an easily forgettable mass of stream of consciousness. I think the trick to writing like this is to make it more interesting than the readers' own constant stream otherwise they unknowingly tune out.
This book brings to mind that 4 Non Blonds song. And the weird thing is that I didn't even know until 5 seconds ago that Linda Perry, like this rambling character, is also a lesbian. Her song could be the soundtrack for this book: it's content, it's brassy crazed voice, it's silly stoned angst, and all those getting high parts. So similar. Whenever I began reading one of the drug parts, which was basically all the time, I could hear nothing but:
...I take A deep breath and I get real high
And I scream from the top of my lungs,
What's goin' on...
For you that might be an OK association, but I have always hated that god-awful song. And for a book to ring in the same tune as a song that I've hated for decades...for me, it just wasn't good.
This book brings to mind that 4 Non Blonds song. And the weird thing is that I didn't even know until 5 seconds ago that Linda Perry, like this rambling character, is also a lesbian. Her song could be the soundtrack for this book: it's content, it's brassy crazed voice, it's silly stoned angst, and all those getting high parts. So similar. Whenever I began reading one of the drug parts, which was basically all the time, I could hear nothing but:
...I take A deep breath and I get real high
And I scream from the top of my lungs,
What's goin' on...
For you that might be an OK association, but I have always hated that god-awful song. And for a book to ring in the same tune as a song that I've hated for decades...for me, it just wasn't good.
February 7, 2017
this novel is remarkable in a lot of ways, but it is fluent in the language of the downward spiral. our narrator bounces back and forth between flashbacks of childhood obsessions and brief flashes of parental and neighborhood violence with her current day obsessions and addictions. as she falls in love (lust? jane has no real distinguishing characteristics) her new obsession interestingly parallels her addiction to heroin (among other things) and the novel begins a slow drift toward chaos. its a very messy novel, with ends that do not get tied up, lessons that do not get learned get learned, and loves that do no get consummated. but it is fiercely punk and fiercely feminist in its radical approach to accurately depicting this particular life, without the edges smoothed down. its nonlinear, its about the body, and its about the way we move through the world obsessing and placing those obsessions on other people and things.
October 8, 2014
This book is a series of snapshots, a house of cards of stacked Polaroids whose ambition it is to awaken an appreciation for the profoundly transient qualitative aspects of existence. It's filled with crazy wisdom, insight derived by an intense penchant for honest self-reflection, truly inspired poetic flourishes, and an intrepid sense for deployment of metaphor and analogy. Weeks succeeds in rescuing dignity from depravity, and humor lights up the text in delightful and unexpected ways. It's apparent the author has a deep and abiding humanitarian streak, and the narrative manages to avoid seeming nihilistic; it is instead charged with a pervasive, transcendent sexual quality that can not be resisted. This infectious electricity is run through the prose and its intoxicating effects, one realizes, are the result of a heartfelt and earnest attempt at literary alchemy.
April 9, 2020
"bu toplum çok alçak ve aynı zamanda nefret dolu" diyen, "eroin denemeden bu hayattan çekip gidemezsiniz, hayatı sonuna kadar yaşamak istiyorsanız tıpkı birçok seks çeşidi gibi bunu da yapmak zorundasınız" diyen bir lezbiyen doksanlar new york'undaki yaşamını sakınmasız bir dürüstlükle anlatıyor. müzikler, filmler ve kitapları da anıyor. bol uyuşturuculu, hüzünlü, esprili, hınzır, çıplak ve delişmen bir yeraltı edebiyatı klasiği olarak kabul edilmiş ve ödüllenmiş. türü sevenlere tavsiye...
January 2, 2012
This is a brilliant brilliant novel. It bounces between kinds of perverse innocence, it reaches and retreats. It is reactive. It is punk. It is girl. It is abject and superhero. It is like if Lynda Barry's girl-children found themselves adult, addicted, in the city. Nobody writes mental-chemical vicissitudes so charmingly or acurately as Laurie Weeks. It is true.
January 5, 2012
The fact that it's blurbed by Michelle Tea and Eileen Myles should be enough to get you to read this thing.
Holy wow. Loose and non-linear, messy and gorgeous. So many perfectly delicious sentences. I found myself grinning on the subway at this book because it's just right, dark and hilarious and desperate all at once.
Holy wow. Loose and non-linear, messy and gorgeous. So many perfectly delicious sentences. I found myself grinning on the subway at this book because it's just right, dark and hilarious and desperate all at once.
June 12, 2012
Oy. I want to write a novel this funny and heartbreaking and beautiful! And while you can accuse Zipper Mouth of having a loose, rambling plot (the book seems to suffer from ADD but I mean this in the best possible way), it's still one hell of a ride--a consistently engaging, thoughtful, gorgeous piece of fiction.
August 14, 2013
Maddening and fantastic. Sometimes I wanted to shake the book/protagonist while at the same time I was in love with the inventive language and unapologetic persistence of the narrator. The language kept surprising me, over and over. I wanted to underline something on every page. And for that I'll give it five stars.
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