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Double Teenage
DOUBLE TEENAGE tells the story of Celine and Julie, two girls coming of age in the 1990s in a desert town close to the US-Mexico border. Starting from their shared love of theater, the girls move into a wider world that shimmers with intellectual and artistic possibility, but at the same time, is dense with threat. This unrelenting novel shines a spotlight on paradoxes of Western culture. It asks impossible questions about the media's obsession with sexual violence as it twins with a social unwillingness to look at real pain. It asks what it feels like to be a girl, simultaneously a being and a thing, feeling in a marketplace. Wherever they are whether in a dance club in El Paso or an art lecture in Vancouver these characters find themselves in a brutal landscape. This is a portrait of the recent past, seen through the cloudy lens of now, of friends struggling within self-destructive realities. Part bildungsroman, part performance, part passionate essay, part magic spell, what DOUBLE TEENAGE ultimately offers is a way to see through violence into an emotionally alive place beyond the myriad traps of girlhood.
260 pages, Paperback
First published March 24, 2015
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Displaying 1 - 20 of 20 reviews
July 12, 2017
My full review is available here: http://www.full-stop.net/2017/07/11/r...
An excerpt:
"Colonialism, white settlers, middle-class aspirations, American military expansion and might; these are the building blocks on which suburban white aspirations in New Mexico are founded, regardless of whether its members identify with the values of American exceptionalism, or, like Celine’s mother, disavow them and chafe at the injustice of it all. On the horizon, along with the desert, there is the tinge of danger that Celine and Julie grow up learning about. This is a danger that continually surrounds them. The specter of violence against women meted out against the bodies of working-class brown women in Ciudad-Juárez is the specter that haunts this book, and Celine and Julie’s consciousness. Joni Murphy’s book is interested in these questions; it is unabashedly intelligent and unafraid of where these queries might go. It’s a book that wears a sense of responsibility about both its white female subjects and the numerous women, all over North America, who meet an end at the hands of men: many of whom are not white, not middle-class, and therefore outside of the scope of Celine and Julie’s experience. From the start it is clear that this is not a novel that wants to focus on character or plot development or tell a story; rather, it’s about the social and political forces that shape Celine and Julie’s lives and the lives of women they know, and an attempt to highlight the material forces that shape lives more than individual agency and will."
An excerpt:
"Colonialism, white settlers, middle-class aspirations, American military expansion and might; these are the building blocks on which suburban white aspirations in New Mexico are founded, regardless of whether its members identify with the values of American exceptionalism, or, like Celine’s mother, disavow them and chafe at the injustice of it all. On the horizon, along with the desert, there is the tinge of danger that Celine and Julie grow up learning about. This is a danger that continually surrounds them. The specter of violence against women meted out against the bodies of working-class brown women in Ciudad-Juárez is the specter that haunts this book, and Celine and Julie’s consciousness. Joni Murphy’s book is interested in these questions; it is unabashedly intelligent and unafraid of where these queries might go. It’s a book that wears a sense of responsibility about both its white female subjects and the numerous women, all over North America, who meet an end at the hands of men: many of whom are not white, not middle-class, and therefore outside of the scope of Celine and Julie’s experience. From the start it is clear that this is not a novel that wants to focus on character or plot development or tell a story; rather, it’s about the social and political forces that shape Celine and Julie’s lives and the lives of women they know, and an attempt to highlight the material forces that shape lives more than individual agency and will."
September 21, 2016
loved this book. celine and julie are two narrative mirrors erupting out of a desert in new mexico. consistently smart. a work that through anecdote, analysis, and aphorism -- along with elemental doses of despair and anger -- exposes the systemic construction and confines of "girlhood," arguably defined here as an integral, lower limit Tiqqun upper limit Bratmobile.
or, another way: the various acts of defining found to be inextricably tautological to the problem. this dilemma at the heart of the book. murphy in an interview says: "For a long time the manuscript was developing as a longer and longer narrative essay and a series of poems. Both tried to get at some central questions, namely: Why does girlhood feel like a trap?..."
published by the on fire Canadian small press bookthug : won't you seek it out?
joni murphy interviewed by chris kraus
and with tobias carroll:
I needed to find a way of communicating that this story was not really about the two main characters, that fiction uses individuals to get people to care about society, but that can become a way of fetishizing the singular. I would never write a story from the point of view of a girl working in a maquiladora in Juarez, but neither would I want to just describe their bodies as things (as Bolaño did to devastating effect in 2666) because I related to them as beings, but at the same time I am not in their position.
So the end of this book, this different style, was my way of saying individuals matter, but we’re all embedded in systems and structures. They/ we belong to a world of connections in which we’re told these connections don’t exist. Only when a pattern is overwhelmingly horrific does it get recognized as a pattern.
or, another way: the various acts of defining found to be inextricably tautological to the problem. this dilemma at the heart of the book. murphy in an interview says: "For a long time the manuscript was developing as a longer and longer narrative essay and a series of poems. Both tried to get at some central questions, namely: Why does girlhood feel like a trap?..."
published by the on fire Canadian small press bookthug : won't you seek it out?
joni murphy interviewed by chris kraus
and with tobias carroll:
I needed to find a way of communicating that this story was not really about the two main characters, that fiction uses individuals to get people to care about society, but that can become a way of fetishizing the singular. I would never write a story from the point of view of a girl working in a maquiladora in Juarez, but neither would I want to just describe their bodies as things (as Bolaño did to devastating effect in 2666) because I related to them as beings, but at the same time I am not in their position.
So the end of this book, this different style, was my way of saying individuals matter, but we’re all embedded in systems and structures. They/ we belong to a world of connections in which we’re told these connections don’t exist. Only when a pattern is overwhelmingly horrific does it get recognized as a pattern.
May 22, 2016
"These are girls not as bodies, not as parts, but as humans being alive. It's amazing this must be said, but it must. Such recognition is not a given; it is a fight."
This is the kind of book I am always waiting for but don't find often enough: heady, feminist, challenging. Formally complex, it progresses from lyrical to surreal, blending urgent ideas from popular culture, recent history and the literary theory so many of us read in graduate school. Still, it remains grounded in reality, especially the reality of women in a world that actively works against them.
This is the kind of book I am always waiting for but don't find often enough: heady, feminist, challenging. Formally complex, it progresses from lyrical to surreal, blending urgent ideas from popular culture, recent history and the literary theory so many of us read in graduate school. Still, it remains grounded in reality, especially the reality of women in a world that actively works against them.
August 9, 2017
A quick but poignant read. Being a girl is fucking hard.
March 18, 2018
Just the presentation of Vancouver BC (and the skeleton's in its closet) made this book worth it. Told with the skill of a poet, this jagged narrative reveals the hidden, everyday horrors of patriarchal capitalism and its effects on two women trying to survive within it. I loved this book.
August 13, 2023
This is the book that Normal People wishes it was. A story of two people, growing up, growing apart and growing back together- tied together by an invisible string attached to them during their primitive teenage years. This book was so full of profound and beautiful lines that I started recording them in my notes to pull them out in conversations for how much they made me think.
"If we had been born men you would call upon genius ghosts to validate our sins"
This is what books should be. This is what reading is all about. I had never heard anything of this book or the author before and I just randomly picked it up at a used book sale (I almost didn't get it and I'm so glad that I did). This book made me excited to read and made me realize what books and reading were all about- discovering stories that you didn't know you needed and that completely change your life.
This book touched on so many different conversations that I feel like I'd been trying to have and just put them into words. It covered such an array of subject matter and yet it never felt stuffed or like things didn't get the time and attention they deserved. From teenage female friendships, the shitshow that is being a teenage girl, becoming a woman, the way the media handles sexual violence, gifted child burnout and the complexities of sexual politics. At the heart, it's a gritty coming-of-age story about growing into womanhood and realizing how violent and fucked up the world can be towards women.
"the Young Girl stands for the universal prostitution of the human in the interest of objectified profit"
To conclude, this is one of the best books I've ever read and I think it should be yours too.
"If we had been born men you would call upon genius ghosts to validate our sins"
This is what books should be. This is what reading is all about. I had never heard anything of this book or the author before and I just randomly picked it up at a used book sale (I almost didn't get it and I'm so glad that I did). This book made me excited to read and made me realize what books and reading were all about- discovering stories that you didn't know you needed and that completely change your life.
This book touched on so many different conversations that I feel like I'd been trying to have and just put them into words. It covered such an array of subject matter and yet it never felt stuffed or like things didn't get the time and attention they deserved. From teenage female friendships, the shitshow that is being a teenage girl, becoming a woman, the way the media handles sexual violence, gifted child burnout and the complexities of sexual politics. At the heart, it's a gritty coming-of-age story about growing into womanhood and realizing how violent and fucked up the world can be towards women.
"the Young Girl stands for the universal prostitution of the human in the interest of objectified profit"
To conclude, this is one of the best books I've ever read and I think it should be yours too.
January 9, 2019
This book does something I haven't seen before, which I respect, but I don't know if it fully clicked for me. It explicitly states that it's not really about Celine and Julie, the protagonists, as individuals/characters, but objects of social forces, representations of this concept of the Young Girl that Murphy is interested in investigating. Murphy does this by in some places, clearly stating that Celine/Julie (whose names come from a French film) are placeholders, and by making lots of theory references, both in the narration and through Julie's studies when she becomes a film theory PhD student. The final section is a sort of segmented, prosey poem that really abstracts away from Celine/Julie's perspectives to cite more theory and refer to policies/structural forces (e.g., NAFTA -- which felt throwaway). Overall, the narration feels zoomed out -- about rough progressions of feelings, situations, "traumas" (quotes because the word pops up a lot), rather than the contours of specific emotions and events.
I think this is definitely… interesting. Genuinely. And I actually enjoyed the genre-mixing with the prosey poem (sometimes there are real line breaks so it's not a full-on prose poem!!!). But I wonder if there are ways to investigate the theoretical/philosophical questions Murphy is interested in without sacrificing character and detail. Imogen Binnie's Nevada comes to mind as an example of a novel that brought in theory (the protagonist Maria has a really active narrative voice that brings in (and anguishes about) queer theory) while convincing the reader to care about Maria and her particular situation. Perhaps Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being too, though I think rather than character itself (I'm not sure if I cared much about them as individuals), the thing that book did that Double Teenage could learn from is the incorporation of theory in a way that felt organic and relevant to the characters' lives.
What stands out, in good and bad ways, about how Murphy approaches theory through fiction is her forcefulness about how while Celine/Julie are placeholders, they are not universal, in virtue of their white and educational/class privilege. I really appreciate her explicit identification of this privilege, as it is something that might be more comfortable to obfuscate. Furthermore, Murphy's interest in the gap between Celine/Julie's experiences and other women (brown women, sex workers) seems to parallel her interest in the limits of theory, even as she relies on it and clearly finds it useful. As Julie studies theory, Murphy communicates a sense of dissonance between what she was learning (often taught/written by white men) and her (and other women's) realities. The study of theory is often written about in a way that suggests roteness, objectification: "The girls rush into more learning, more experience… Study and work and shows and parties and art and movies. They attend lectures and roundtables and debates. They learn to so much; to think about themselves as if from the outside." This was rad, fresh, and identifiable as someone who read, fell in love with, then felt jaded with a lot of theory in school.
Still in those moments when Murphy would identify how Celine/Julie are privileged, I often thought, "And?" As placeholders, creations through which to explore larger concepts of girlhood and objectification, Celine/Julie felt like well, objects, and not agents, occasionally recognizing but not doing anything with their privilege. I understand that this book is about objectification, but I think the most accurate/interesting/hopeful answer to the question, "Do women have agency?" isn't "no, they're objects" but something more fuzzy. To me, literature is great because it can explore that fuzziness in a way that theory has more difficulty doing. Like I loved Asymmetry by Lisa Halliday.
Another throwaway thing, I wasn't sure what to make of the theater references. They felt inconsistent, important at the beginning and end but not in between. I was recommended this book by a theater person though so maybe they mean something to something else. Also, the writing could be nice. Unique, with its musically repetitive sentences.
I think this is definitely… interesting. Genuinely. And I actually enjoyed the genre-mixing with the prosey poem (sometimes there are real line breaks so it's not a full-on prose poem!!!). But I wonder if there are ways to investigate the theoretical/philosophical questions Murphy is interested in without sacrificing character and detail. Imogen Binnie's Nevada comes to mind as an example of a novel that brought in theory (the protagonist Maria has a really active narrative voice that brings in (and anguishes about) queer theory) while convincing the reader to care about Maria and her particular situation. Perhaps Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being too, though I think rather than character itself (I'm not sure if I cared much about them as individuals), the thing that book did that Double Teenage could learn from is the incorporation of theory in a way that felt organic and relevant to the characters' lives.
What stands out, in good and bad ways, about how Murphy approaches theory through fiction is her forcefulness about how while Celine/Julie are placeholders, they are not universal, in virtue of their white and educational/class privilege. I really appreciate her explicit identification of this privilege, as it is something that might be more comfortable to obfuscate. Furthermore, Murphy's interest in the gap between Celine/Julie's experiences and other women (brown women, sex workers) seems to parallel her interest in the limits of theory, even as she relies on it and clearly finds it useful. As Julie studies theory, Murphy communicates a sense of dissonance between what she was learning (often taught/written by white men) and her (and other women's) realities. The study of theory is often written about in a way that suggests roteness, objectification: "The girls rush into more learning, more experience… Study and work and shows and parties and art and movies. They attend lectures and roundtables and debates. They learn to so much; to think about themselves as if from the outside." This was rad, fresh, and identifiable as someone who read, fell in love with, then felt jaded with a lot of theory in school.
Still in those moments when Murphy would identify how Celine/Julie are privileged, I often thought, "And?" As placeholders, creations through which to explore larger concepts of girlhood and objectification, Celine/Julie felt like well, objects, and not agents, occasionally recognizing but not doing anything with their privilege. I understand that this book is about objectification, but I think the most accurate/interesting/hopeful answer to the question, "Do women have agency?" isn't "no, they're objects" but something more fuzzy. To me, literature is great because it can explore that fuzziness in a way that theory has more difficulty doing. Like I loved Asymmetry by Lisa Halliday.
Another throwaway thing, I wasn't sure what to make of the theater references. They felt inconsistent, important at the beginning and end but not in between. I was recommended this book by a theater person though so maybe they mean something to something else. Also, the writing could be nice. Unique, with its musically repetitive sentences.
June 28, 2018
"Celine felt the desert was a science fiction"
I loved this book. It's the kind of story you don't want to end: poetic, complex and relatable. I am always in search of books like this but they are rare.
It's the story of two friends, Celine and Julie, who live in New Mexico, in a desert town close to the border and Ciudad Juarez, where girls like them disappear all the time.
They grow up, though, and they study art and theory and they fall in love and move from the desert.
There is a lot in this book: there is the desert and what happens in the desert, there's violence described in a subtle, muffled way, the most impressive way; there are the coming of age stories of two girls navigating adulthood and surviving womanhood; there is a reflection on the limits of theory and critical studies.
I'd like to translate this book so I could dive into it for months.
Oh and the opening quote is by Lisa Robertson - I mean!
Did you read it? What do you think?
I loved this book. It's the kind of story you don't want to end: poetic, complex and relatable. I am always in search of books like this but they are rare.
It's the story of two friends, Celine and Julie, who live in New Mexico, in a desert town close to the border and Ciudad Juarez, where girls like them disappear all the time.
They grow up, though, and they study art and theory and they fall in love and move from the desert.
There is a lot in this book: there is the desert and what happens in the desert, there's violence described in a subtle, muffled way, the most impressive way; there are the coming of age stories of two girls navigating adulthood and surviving womanhood; there is a reflection on the limits of theory and critical studies.
I'd like to translate this book so I could dive into it for months.
Oh and the opening quote is by Lisa Robertson - I mean!
Did you read it? What do you think?
May 9, 2022
Pretty disappointing read given the high rating (at the time 4.22 on goodreads). A disjointed story of 2 girls growing up. Some parts were interesting (like their attempts at relationships and the sidebar on media coverage of the serial killer in the Vancouver area), but just didn't explore those ideas enough.
August 8, 2022
Very interesting read. It’s not very plot driven at all and more just telling the stories Of these two girls who grew up together.
It has challenging writing and vocab and definitely needs a second or third read to fully understand it (rating is based on only the first read through)
It has challenging writing and vocab and definitely needs a second or third read to fully understand it (rating is based on only the first read through)
February 24, 2017
Really excited to see the next one she puts out—this was great, and a lot of fun, but felt like a stepping stone. The last chapter blew me away.
June 14, 2017
I wanted to like it. I did like it. Then nothing happened. And the final part was disjointed paragraphs about why capitalism is bad and neofeminism is good. I get. It just fell short for me.
August 8, 2019
violence as desert landscape
dnf
February 6, 2024It's not you, it's me. The writing is lovely, and I wish it had existed when I was 16. Two decades past that, I'm not connecting to it the way I want.
Read
June 30, 2016Following Amazon's purchase of GoodReads, I no longer post my reviews here.
If you would like to read my thoughts on this book, you can view them in the following places:
BuriedInPrint
BookLikes
LibraryThing
Posting these links does not constitute permission to duplicate these thoughts anywhere, including corporate-owned sites.
If you read/liked/clicked through to see this review here on GR, many thanks.
If you would like to read my thoughts on this book, you can view them in the following places:
BuriedInPrint
BookLikes
LibraryThing
Posting these links does not constitute permission to duplicate these thoughts anywhere, including corporate-owned sites.
If you read/liked/clicked through to see this review here on GR, many thanks.
July 25, 2025
This book is not the definitive book on NAFTA, or the American Southwest, or most of the other things that Chris Kraus thinks this book is a definitive exploration of. But this is a book thoughtful about violence and girls and girls' bodies. It is important and critical and novel in medium (it's a pun, of course). It's a very good book.
Read
September 27, 2016A charming first novel with lots of good writing. In the final quarter it hits a morose boyfriend glitch, but I would definitely read another book by this author. The theme doesn't fully cohere, but the language is inventive and the generational details are resonant.
August 30, 2018
ahhh...just want to go back add to my review...cause ive argued it w/ my friend Eugene...but in swath of great books I read when this came out...which included Argonauts, Cyborgs, My Struggle and the Cusks and My best friend's...this book was the most memorable
August 13, 2016
Read this book !!!!!
June 29, 2016
I loved this one. Check out my blog for my review.
Displaying 1 - 20 of 20 reviews