Crybaby Butch

by Judith Frank

Drawing on her experience as an adult literacy tutor, Judith Frank's first novel traces the difficult and sometimes hilarious connection between two butches of different generations - a middle-class, thirty-something adult literacy teacher and her older, working-class student. With a disparate group of adult learners as the backdrop, Frank examines, with warmth and wit, the relationship between education and gender, class, and racial identity.

With Crybaby Butch, Judith Frank creates a deeply human, bravely unsentimental story while at the same time investigating the meaning of butch identity as it reinvents itself from one generation to the next. ~ Carol Anshaw

Fearless and unflinching, Crybaby Butch rigorously explores butch/femme dynamics over two generations. Judy Frank's debut novel is searing and memorable. ~ Claire Messud

Genres: Fiction, LGBT, Queer, Lesbian, Jewish, Butch Femme, Judaism

416 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2004

About the author

Judith Frank holds a BA from the Hebrew University, and an MFA and PhD from Cornell University. She is the author of Crybaby Butch (Firebrand Books, 2004), which was awarded a Lambda Literary Award in 2004. In 2008 she received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship for All I Love and Know. She has been a resident at Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony, and has published short fiction in The Massachusetts Review, other voices, and Best Lesbian Love Stories 2005. She teaches English and creative writing at Amherst College, and lives with her partner and two children in Amherst, MA.

Reviews

[Karen · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found this book frustrating because it had so much potential yet needed so much work. I think it would've been fulfilling to be her editor and be the one to say "Great characterization, but we don't need so much backstory on every character" or "I can't tell what's going on in this chapter where you don't use any names." It felt like the flaws in her writing were concrete and fixable, whereas the stuff that can't be taught she's got. Her characters are multi-faceted, you can see how they come across differently in different settings and how they can mean well but rub each other the wrong way, how someone can be suave in one context and prickly in another. But there was so much unnecessary, boring side plot, so much telling-not-showing about all the minor characters, too many minor characters... it just needed a lot of cleaning up. Also, while I loved the premise of an old-school butch interacting with a younger butch, it seemed that their friction was all about social class and not about the ways butch identities have changed.

[Faith Reidenbach · Rating 5 out of 5]

The best fiction I've read that zeroes in on class and race from a white (Jewish) person's perspective. The main character, Anna, is a butch Jewish lesbian in her first year of teaching adults to read. She was born upper middle-class but, despite her PhD, she's living lower middle-class because she can't get an academic job. We learn a lot about the principles and methods of adult basic education, and since I was once a literacy tutor, that interested me in itself.

Most of Anna's students are people of color and poor. Here's how far the author's consciousness has been raised: she has Anna reflect on why she chose to read Bastard Out of Carolina to the class, not Push. But Anna makes some naive mistakes, especially with Chris, a white working-class bulldagger who came of age in the 50's. We learn all about Chris's life, too; in fact, it may be fair to say that Anna and Chris are equally the protagonists and antagonists of the story. Butch-on-butch action.

To give us a sense of the other students, now and then the author slides in and out of their heads, short shifts of point of view that arrive unexpectedly but are handled expertly.

The book contains just over 400 pages of small print, and it feels long. There's too much detail of things like showers and coffee drinking, and a couple of characters could have been dropped or combined. Otherwise, it's an impressive and thoroughly enjoyable achievement. The plot is much richer than I can convey here. Winner of the 2004 Lambda Award for Debut Lesbian Fiction.

[Sandra · Rating 2 out of 5]

It took me almost 5 years to FINALLY finish this book and now I remember why... what a jumble of characters and boring, mundane situations. Also, Anna and Chris were extremely unlikeable and generally shitty human beings whose odd relationship just fizzled on the page. Most of the characters (and there were way too many) were unlikeable. I found the story jumped around too much and was a hot mess of painfully boring descriptions. This could’ve used an editor.

[Catherine · Rating 2 out of 5]

Follow on the heels of Stone Butch Blues. It's a nice enough story and brings up the important issue of the disconnect between older and younger generations in the queer community, but you could do better.

[Joules · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thinking of rereading this book soon. I remember it giving me a sense of normalcy, like a slice of life kind of book, that wasn’t overbearingly heavy. Kind of a surprisingly light breath of air, especially when compared to other lesbian novels set in a similar period in time. Bittersweet, honest, and very good for reminding me of things I love about butches (as a femme myself)

[Em Lowes · Rating 4 out of 5]

a really good if not sad book. took me multiple months for some reason and the ending was pretty upsetting as well as the characters being pretty much exclusively unlikable but weirdly enough those traits kinda both made it more compelling.

[Stacy · Rating 3 out of 5]

2.5 stars

[Corvus]

This one isn't doing it for me. Maybe I'll try again another time.

[Lizz Otero · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book really kept my attention but the ending was off for me. I was ready to give it 4 stars until the last few chapters.

[Bad Cookie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed reading this book, but it's definitely not a light summer read. My heart broke for the characters in this book, for Chris and the other students Anna is teaching. They've all lived through cruel and harsh lives, yet they're still hopeful of improving their lives through learning how to read. My only wish is that the ending had been different. I wasn't expecting a cheesy Hollywood ending, but I wanted something more definite. The hell with it, I wanted Chris to dump Kathleen and end up with Anna. Kathleen wasn't all bad, but she sure wasn't as supportive of Chris as she should have been.

[Nina · Rating 2 out of 5]

Another one for the book club. Unfortunately, I didn't finish in time and after we all discussed it I put it back on the shelf - obviously it didn't have too much of a pull... In an attempt to finish all my half started books this year I finished it 3 months late(r). I'm glad I did too because the people in the book remind me of how I don't want to be. There were so many different points of view it all seemed a bit jumbled in the end. It was a sneak peek into people's lives where the ending doesn't come together perfectly. That might be what I liked most?! I'm not sure about this one...

[Bel · Rating 1 out of 5]

Yup, that's it. I soldiered on for book club but am ditching this after 205 of its 416 pages. I have suffered enough tedious detail and bouncing around different characters' heads.

It's a shame as the book tries to explore some interesting themes of race, class, butch identity, butch/femme dynamics and the effects of adult illiteracy. My opinion, and others in book club differed, is that the writing is just too amateur to do these justice.

[Mo]

Judy was my advisor in college, so I am really interested to see what this is like...I used to love it when she would make all sorts of references to Leave It To Beaver and the Mets in her Politics of the Gothic in the English novel class...

[Purlewe · Rating 4 out of 5]

remembering I read this a long time ago.