La Bâtarde

by Violette Leduc, Simone de Beauvoir (Foreword), Derek Coltman (Translator)

An obsessive and revealing self-portrait of a remarkable woman humiliated by the circumstances of her birth and by her physical appearance, La Batarde relates Violette Leduc's long search for her own identity through a series of agonizing and passionate love affairs with both men and women. When first published, La Batarde earned Violette Leduc comparisons to Jean Genet for the frank depiction of her sexual escapades and immoral behavior. A confession that contains portraits of several famous French authors, this book is more than just a scintillating memoir. Like that of Henry Miller, Leduc's brilliant writing style and attention to language transform this autobiography into a work of art.

Violette Leduc was born the illegitimate daughter of a servant girl and was encouraged to write by Maurice Sachs and Simone de Beauvoir. Her first novel, L'Asphyxie (In the Prison of Her Skin), was published by Camus for Gallimard and earned her praise from Jean-Paul Sartre, Jean Cocteau, and Jean Genet. She went on to write eight more books, including Ravages, L'Affamee, and La Folie en tete (Mad in Pursuit), the second part of her literary autobiography.

Genres: Fiction, France, Queer, LGBT, Classics, French Literature, Literature

488 pages, Paperback

First published September 25, 1964

About the author

Violette Leduc was born in Arras, Pas de Calais, France, the illegitimate daughter of a servant girl, Berthe. In Valenciennes, the young Violette spent most of her childhood suffering from an ugly self-image and from her mother's hostility and overprotectiveness.

Her formal education, begun in 1913, was interrupted by World War I. After the war, she went to a boarding school, the Collège de Douai, where she experienced lesbian affairs with a classmate and a music instructor who was fired over the incident.

In 1926, Leduc moved to Paris and enrolled in the Lycée Racine. That same year, she failed her baccalaureate exam and began working as a telephone operator and secretary at Plon publishers.

In 1932 she met Maurice Sachs and Simone de Beauvoir, who encouraged her to write. Her first novel L'Asphyxie (In the Prison of Her Skin) was published by Albert Camus for Éditions Gallimard and earned her praise from Jean-Paul Sartre, Jean Cocteau and Jean Genet.

Leduc's best-known book, the memoir La Bâtarde, was published in 1964. It nearly won the Prix Goncourt and quickly became a bestseller. She went on to write eight more books, including La Folie en tête (Mad in Pursuit), the second part of her literary autobiography.

Reviews

[Vit Babenco · Rating 5 out of 5]

La Bâtarde reads almost like a  counterpoint  to In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust.
What is the sum total of one’s life? Violette Leduc starts her story summing up her life…

My case is not unique: I am afraid of dying and distressed at being in this world. I haven’t worked, I haven’t studied. I have wept, I have cried out in protest. These tears and cries have taken up a great deal of my time… I wish I had been born a statue; I am a slug under my dunghill. Virtues, good qualities, courage, meditation, culture. With arms crossed on my breast I have broken myself against those words.

She disdainfully contemplates the past… Her mother’s illegal love… The caricature figure of her father…

How did she love him? Courageously, fiercely, wildly. It was the love of a lifetime, it was a victim’s march to the sacrifice. I forgive him, she says again. He was sick, he depended on his parents, he was afraid of his father. When it had happened, he said: “Swear you’ll leave town, my little one, swear you’ll go away.” She swore, she would have crawled at his feet, she thought she had sinned. He had his linen washed in London, but his soul was less refined. Cowardly, lazy, good for nothing. My mirror, Mother, my mirror.

The narration is very intense… Her words are bitter… Her sentences are full of sadness… Her childhood is unhappy…
She’s growing up… She becomes introverted… She introspects…

My piano, my books. I didn’t say to myself: Tolstoy and Dostoievsky are worth years of school. They didn’t come into it: they were simply the companions of my sleepless nights. I lived in their world, I gave myself to their characters, I gulped them down because the more I read of their novels, the hungrier I became with every page. Life isn’t just reading at night and practicing scales. I couldn’t understand anything, I couldn’t remember anything, I never won any prizes.

The world is so inimical… She is so lonely… But quite unexpectedly she has her first experience of love…

She wound her arms around me while I pretended to resist. It was the first time she had held me against her standing up.
We listened to the whirlwind turning the nebula in our insides, we followed the circling sails of the dormitory’s shadowy windmills.

She fails the school… She finds a job in the publishing house in Paris… She’s in love with a young woman… She meets a young man… They form a kind of a love triangle… Their triangle isn’t equilateral… She abides in the world of books and authors…
She passes through love… She passes through ordeals… She passes through hardships… She becomes a writer…

Adoremus for six voices.
I am listening to this cantata for men’s voices, for women’s voices, as I go on with my story one August Monday of 1960. The voices are more heavenly than the gray heavens; the grave, deep voices rise up to a heaven that weeps on us every day.

Milieu of our childhood makes of us what we are.

[Jim Fonseca · Rating 5 out of 5]

First the beautiful, literary writing. Some samples from Leduc’s first experience of Paris as a girl from a rural area: “I had invested so many miles of branching rails…. ‘You are shivering,’ my mother insisted. Because Paris is indifferent and large….Life in a capital is always nerve-wracking. Their jokes, their banter, and their accent were their way of compensating for it….A rain of lovers at midday. …Their temples kissed even when their lips didn’t meet….Miles of worries unwinding from one neighborhood to the next….Paris despite everything was a forest of shapely calves. Paris had a smell of scented armpits….The trace of anisette in the air…Their print dresses, their bodies more conspicuous than if they were unclothed….Paris had enslaved the four corners of the earth….A Japanese woman was pressing down upon the asphalt with her vermillion patterns.”

Almost all of Violette Leduc’s work is autobiographical. This work, “The Bastard,” a name we are told she used for herself, reflects her early life through the German occupation of France in WW II, although she wrote this book in 1964. Leduc was a bisexual who wrote about sex with such frankness that some of her work was censored or went unpublished. She had affairs with women and gay men and for a while was married to a straight man. She worked for a time as an editor and publicist in a mainstream Paris publishing house and many leading French writers became friends of hers and mentors: Andree Gide, Simone de Beauvoir and George Bernanos (Diary of a Country Priest, Mouchette). Camus, Sartre and Genet praised her writing. Folks like Collette, James Joyce and Vincent Van Gough have walk-on roles in the story. Her (non-sexual) affair with a gay man was Maurice Sachs who was writing Witches’ Sabbath at the time.

Leduc blamed her mother for her problems, but the reader, even with Leduc as prosecutor and no chance to hear from the defense, has a hard time seeing exactly what the problem was. Her mother supported her, took her in multiple times when she was down and out, and apparently stuck by her without a blink when she was expelled from a girl’s school for having an affair with a female teaching assistant, who was fired. Leduc felt she was ugly because she had a large nose. In her thirties she had an operation to reduce it but of course she was not satisfied. One of her lovers says to her “You will never be satisfied” and another tells her “You’re simply crammed with neuroses” but it goes beyond that: the reader wonders how can a person try so hard to be unhappy and to be discontented? Leduc herself writes that she told her schoolmates “I said I shall be the anvil on which I forge my own sorrow.” They replied “Violette Leduc is nuts.” Another time Leduc writes “I missed the poverty and the nullity of my life in Paris.”

The story is essentially in three parts: her childhood in a small French village in the early 1900’s; then her coming of age as a young woman on the Paris literary scene, and finally World War II when she and her Jewish gay male lover (they had a 9-year on- and off-again relationship) hide out in a rural village from the Nazis. During the war she becomes a black market entrepreneur and makes a lot of money by smuggling meat and butter to Paris by train. There’s a big gap in this chronology – all of WW I -- but perhaps that is because she annoyingly refers to her other works to fill in the gaps “I told that story in Ravages” she writes several times.

Final comments: to give us one more psychological look at Leduc, look at the titles of some of her works. (My direct translations – some have modified titles after they were published in English): The Bastard; Ravages; Asphyxiation; Hunger; Hunting for Love; The Old Girl and Death. Nuts, but a great writer and a role model for later feminist and gay writers.

[Steven Godin · Rating 5 out of 5]

This could possibly be the best thing I've read by a female French writer. Certainly when it comes to feminist lit and writing about one's self and the world around them anyway. Why Leduc is not as well known outside of France as the likes of de Beauvoir, Ernaux, Duras, and others is a mystery. It's one of the most affecting autobiographies I've read. And yes, I see why in some quarters she has been compared to social outcast turned writer Jean Genet. The volatile love affairs here are erotic and intense - both sexes, and she never skims over the cracks when it comes to being brutally honest about her difficult childhood. She grapples with an abusive mother - all the guilt and shame thrown upon her, the struggle to conform to gender; to recognise her true self, and the realization that turning to writing could be a way of finding salvation. The book is very physical when it comes to Leduc describing sensations; that of living in poverty, of being unloved, and the sensuality towards men and women. Her portrayal of the relationship she had with the flamboyant writer Maurice Sachs - the one who gave her the nudge to write, was especially fascinating. As beautifully told as this book is, there is also a sinister feel in-between the nooks and crannies of her narrative giving it an uneasy edge. An overlooked classic.

[Mo · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book had an incredibly powerful tractor beam/lesbian Death Star effect on me in my mid-20's. Literary self destruction at its best. All of you sexually confused goth girls: put down your razors and pick up La Batarde.

[Jessica · Rating 5 out of 5]

For a long time this was my favorite book. When a friend heard that, she gave me a copy she'd found in a 2nd hand shop, and then a year later, forgetting that she'd already done so, made me a second gift of the book (she's very thoughtful). I now own three different editions, neither of which is the one pictured here, a newer one by Dalkey Archive. I remember strongly recommending this autobiography to a new writer-friend in 1986; she started it and found it too slow-going. I found this difficult to understand and really disappointing as I'd devoured it whole... LeDuc is ever the intense writer. I still remember her describing herself as a wilted lettuce leaf... "Discovered" by DeBeauvoir, she was all the rage among the French Literati for awhile: a genuine "artiste naif" who lived and loved with abandon.

[Leslie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Violette LeDuc is needy and she knows it. She stages suicides. She delights when her big nose halts elevator eyes. She’s prone to romantic friendships and poor boundaries; as a result she’s always unhinged. I particularly love her in obsessive-romantic mode; she records her hard falls for brutes, sycophants and gay-identified father figures in painstaking detail. I imagine she was an undertow in real life, but in print she’s glamour and genius.

LeDuc's prose is consistently amazing. Observe:

“Judge me. I could have taken him to some disused barn. I could have said to him, here is our home, we will cut our steaks from the rumps of their herds, my darling, a shepherd will lend us his cloak and there are hedges to plunder while the great wind blusters around us.”

Officially one of my favorite books ever.

[Rachel Aloise · Rating 5 out of 5]

I discovered this author recently through the film Violette by Martin Provost. After the equally wonderful portrait of Séraphine de Senlis, Provost is becoming somewhat of a champion for the little known artist. Violette Leduc, at the age of 57, enjoyed a short-lived literary success with La Batârde. Her previous books did not sell, despite the critical esteem of Simone de Beauvoir, Camus, Sartre, Jean Genet... and she quickly fell into oblivion again. This film is a tribute to her immense talent, and I’m so glad it introduced me to her writing.

To read Violette Leduc is to share her emotional torment. In the autofiction La Batârde the urgency of her prose seems to be fuelled by unrelenting inner conflicts.. Short, incisive, and contradicting statements alternate with reveries that go on and on for pages, uninterrupted by punctuation. It’s an intense read, infuriating at times, (when she so clearly sabotages herself) but absolutely fascinating. I love her depiction of Paris in the 1930s, and her detailed evocations of the publishing world of the time are a booklovers delight.

Provost’s film focused on her friendship with Simone de Beauvoir in the post-war years described in the second installment of her autobiography La Folie en tête —I can’t wait to read it.

[Marpesia · Rating 5 out of 5]

La Batarde does not gratify. Leduc refuses to stoop to pander to panting hearts - she simply gives you words of poetry to describe her ugliness, her love affairs, small joys and solitude. And yet, she is not all poetry. She is experimental, and is relentless is driving forth her need to tell you about what a horrible being she is - and yet in the end, you find that you feel not only sympathy but a aching heart when she falls and rises again.
From her childhood trials in provincial France, to her affairs with her classmate Isabelle and her teacher Hermine, to her forced departure to Paris (for being found out with her affairs with the music teacher), to her discovery of Gabriel, to her abortions and black-market activity during World War II, the character that Violette portrays herself is no saint, but in refusing to give herself some pride she emerges as a martyr - of fate (being born with, as she says, an ugly nose). There is no question about her ugliness - even de Beauvoir is reputed to have made fun of her behind her back. Yet this woman must have had charisma, for designers gave her clothing to wear and show off on the streets. A contradiction, this woman was, and this quality of hers is very much shown to the reader in her autobiography.

[Lea · Rating 2 out of 5]

These 400 pages felt at least twice as long. I had trouble to get into La Batarde from the start. Once I'd gotten used to the rambly, poetic and sometimes non-sensical language, I found myself liking it more and it became easier to concentrate on her life. Her childhood, youth and her first relationship with a girl at school - that was interesting. But soon, I grew weary of the navel-gazing. Leduc was great at describing small things in detail, and setting scenes, but the book just kind of goes in waves, and is not very engaging. She thinks her life is a lot more thrilling than it is.

All the glowing 5 star reviews praise Leduc's writing style - and yes, it's a rather unique one, but I found it overbearing. I don't like all that many similis and flowery prose. I also think I had a bad translation because some sentences just made no sense, no matter how often I re-read them. I was ready to give this book up early on, and I'm glad I'm pushed through because there were interesting parts, but overall I didn't enjoy the reading experience.

[Kate]

Wore on me after awhile. Imagine the most irritating, self-absorbed person you have ever met, who has minimal self-discipline, but who also happens to be a beautiful writer. On one page she writes about the pleasures of eating an endive cooked in cream. It is over in two paragraphs, but it keeps you thinking. On another page she writes a really miserable self-destructive dialogue with some horrible man who doesn't love her, and twenty pages later, she's still going at it. Welcome to almost 500 pages of this stuff. Liked the obsessive vignettes about buying dresses at Schiaparelli though, later running around Paris with a suitcase full of black market meat, and of course the publishing stuff.

[lisa_emily · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well written, but too indulgent. It's like being in a relationship that you can't get out of until the bitter end. I felt this after reading 187 pages of the 400+ pages.

[A. Hadessa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Gostei gostei !
Nem amei tudo mais foi ótimo! Acima de tudo, obtive inspiraçãoes para alguns dos textos dela que eu já tinha lido em alemão. Estou impressionado com a facilidade de compreensão. Provavelmente usarei a versão em português com mais frequência em breve para aprimorar minha língua materna.

[Mina · Rating 5 out of 5]

La claque. Lire du Violette Leduc c'est se faire happer par l'autrice dans un violent tourbillon sensoriel, émotionnel. Une marmite de sorcière mélange descriptions, impressions et sentiments dans une potion acide et addictive. Leduc ne nous épargne rien de sa mesquinerie, de sa petitesse comme le dit Simone de Beauvoir dans la préface. Moi petite et mesquine, je souffre en moi et en elle et je lis comme une tragédie l'inéluctable ombre qui habite dans elle et dans moi.
Son écriture impatiente rapièce au fil d'or 5 phrases en deux mots. On se fait interpeller, témoin ou voyeur on ne sait plus tellement.
Je n'ai pas vu venir la fin, ni le début finalement. J'en veux encore de cette écriture nerveuse, de cette aigreur sans concession, de ces lignes malicieuses qui nous font perdre la tête, perdre le fil, qui nous énivrent.
Autofiction qui renvoit lae lecteurice à ses autres romans, ce récit nous décrit la vie de Violette Leduc de son lycée à la fin de la guerre. Une 20aine d'années. Je suis obsédée par son écriture.
POURQUOI MERDE A LA FIN ON N'ETUDIE PAS VIOLETTE LEDUC A L'ECOLE ???

[Meg Powers · Rating 5 out of 5]

I borrowed La Batarde from one of my dearest friends to have something comforting to read while away at school. Being a "really old" (as one sniveling teenager had described me) freshman living on a secluded college campus has been an isolating experience so far; reading Violette Leduc's memoirs of unending loneliness was a good way to hush my own feelings of isolation.

It is interesting and almost comforting that Leduc began writing seriously after a lifestyle of wandering around for the first two decades of adulthood, when most people seem to have figured themselves out (she began writing cheesy copy for magazines in her twenties and didn't attempt to write a book until her thirties). The book is beautifully written and often times lacking punctuation as if she was ranting breathlessly for the book's 488 pages. Her injections of poetry into descriptions of her everyday life is gorgeous; aside from her stormy love affairs and WW II black marketeering, Leduc didn't have wild, life-shaking events to recount but made the most mundane morning activities a captivating read. Her words are focused on her everyday and her vanity of self-loathing. I love this abbreviated line, which is featured in a misty, vague description of her wanderings by the Seine and her ability to drive people away : "My empire of invalids, my crustacean cemetery." Her words are reminiscent of Lautreamont, yet her grotesqueries are gentle and elegant rather than shocking.

In regards to Leduc's descriptions of her sexuality, I was surprised by her fascination with male homosexuals. Her friendship with the homosexual writer Maurice Sachs was propelled by her difficulties in accepting the idea that a man could solely love other men. Her attitude seemed unlikely, considering she was exclusively in lesbian relationships from her teen years to her late twenties and her desire for the male sex was described as vague and confused for that majority of the book. Perhaps this attitude was a product of her bisexuality, which she accepted early on in life and thus spared the reader the familiar "Why do I feel this way about my own sex? I'm a FREEEEAK!" narratives. I suppose if one had already accepted his/her bisexulaity as the norm, heterosexuality and homosexuality alike might have seemed strange.

I applaud Leduc's gender ambiguities: the author's feverish trip to Elsa Schiapparelli's Parisian boutique with her long term girlfriend, Hermine, is recounted as an eroticized and unquestionably feminine scenario. While involved with Hermine, Leduc became a fashion plate for her girlfriend to lavish with hand-sewn clothing, couture accessories, and elegant meals. With her friend and future husband, Gabriel, Leduc was masculinized; she dressed in men's clothing, asked to be made love to as a man, and adopted the role of Gabriel's "little fellow." It is refreshing to read about someone capable of balancing masculinity and femininity, and the only people who seemed to take issue with Leduc's ambiguity were the two lovers in question.

I read this book quickly. It was sexy, engaging, a good escape from my own woe-is-me-isms, and featured a lot of time-capsule worthy descriptions of fashion from the first three decades of her recorded life.

[Sara · Rating 4 out of 5]

23 de julio de 2020: 4,5 en realidad. Aunque se me ha hecho denso en algunas partes, merece mucho la pena.

3 de febrero de 2021: Después de dedicarme 3 intensos días a tiempo completo a la relectura del libro de Leduc puedo decir que en un segundo acercamiento todo se entiende mucho mejor. La identidad de Leduc se construye desde la contradicción y la incoherencia, es como si hubiese hecho una promesa a su origen: su origen es la falta y su vida será una falta. Fracasa, como dice al final, en todo lo importante. No sabe amar ni ser amada. Declara que el fin de un amor es el fin de una tiranía, y que el amor nunca acaba porque sino, sería amor. Después decide que tras la huida de Hermine es una mujer abandonada y que no quiere saber nada más de las mujeres. Quiere que los hombres (siempre homosexuales) la amen como aman a un hombre. Pero incluso ahí, también fracasa.

El final es fascinante. La guerra acaba, fantasea con los fantasmas de su pasado: viajará a ver a Isabelle (la mujer a la que ella abandonó), ve habitualmente a Hermine (la mujer que la abandonó), se pregunta por Maurice Sachs (que ha muerto pero ella todavía no lo sabe, aunque lo intuye o lo sabe desde el presente de 1963 y no desde el de 1945), fantasea con el dinero que gastarán, con los lugares en que desayunaran y después se pregunta si volverá a amar a otro homosexual. Piensa en su madre que abandona París para siempre y recuerda a su abuela, su primer amor, que siempre será su «novia tuberculosa» en su cama y por la que solo llora cuando cinco años después de su muerte comprende que la amaba y que no volverá a verla. Al final se pregunta por todos los fantasmas de su pasado y, en cierto modo, también por los del futuro y parece que en el fondo ama: sabe amar. Quizá a su manera incoherente, contradictoria e incluso cruel, pero ama desde la base de lo que la constituye y de lo que construye su identidad, su vida y su forma de amar son «una revancha con lo anormal».

Leduc escribe sobre su vida porque ella es la historia y la narración. Ve un libro de Beauvoir por primera vez y la dicen: “lo ha escrito una mujer” y se reconcilia consigo misma. Nunca se había atrevido a pensar en escribir y, en cambio, comienza a hacerlo, comienza a contar su infancia porque solo ella puede ser el relato. La obra de Leduc es su vida que se vierte en la escritura. El motivo de su escritura autobiográfica es su propia vida, no una obra que la anteceda y que la de un renombre que haga su vida interesante. En su vida no encontramos nada de universal, es particular, es singular, errática y caótica, pero no por ello menos interesante. Quizá tiene razón Mercedes Arriaga cuando habla de autobiografía femenina, es esto anterior lo que la define, que su obra parte de la vida porque en algún sentido no hay nada más, y con el relato de la vida no se busca dar un modelo de ejemplaridad sobre una personalidad sólida y sobre una vida admirable, sino al contrario, busca ser, expresar, quien es y nada más.

[Justin Holinka · Rating 5 out of 5]

In this current climate obsessed with personal narrative essays and bildungsromans—I'm thinking of Knausgaard, Ferrante, etc.—it is Leduc that everyone should be turning back to with awe and adoration. This autobiography, self-portrait, novel looks back at Proust with affection, looks sideways to Sarraute and Robbe-Grillet with nods of appreciation, looks always at its creator with vicious scrutiny as she traverses through childhood to womanhood, through war and loss and a rich sexual awakening that, just like Leduc's narrative, is not here completed. A masterpiece. There is no doubt I will read everything from her. Sarte, de Beauvoir, Genet, Camus, and Cocteau were all right: Leduc's prose is of the highest order.

[Ana PF · Rating 5 out of 5]

A must read. She was forgotten, but she shouldn't have. Always needy, always down, lacking formal education, haunted by the love-hate relationship with her mother, perhaps. But she had the ability to write. "Anything unattainable, she wanted", said John Patterson in his review of the movie in The Guardian - like so many of us have at some moment in our lives. De Beauvoir put it brilliantly too - “I know of no finer salvation through literature.”

I will definitely reread this book again.

[prisca💋 · Rating 5 out of 5]

sans grande surprise! Magistral du début à la fin. ❤️‍🔥

[Lola D. · Rating 2 out of 5]

(2.5)

[Jenny · Rating 3 out of 5]

There are moments of brilliant writing in this, but much of it is so buried in the writer's obsession with herself that it makes the book quite a slog at times. Often I just wanted to slap her and tell her to stop bitching. Also, this is the only memoir I've ever read where the writer skips over scenes by telling the reader she's already written about those events in previous memoirs. I guess for the ideal Violette Leduc experience, one should surround oneself with all of her books and breathlessly switch back and forth between them for all the juicy details. Yeah, no.

[Czarny Pies · Rating 4 out of 5]

La batarde est la grande classique des hauts et des bas d'une lesbienne mal comprise pendant les annees vingt, trente et quarante . Esperons que tous les efforts bien intentionees des dernieres annees pour promouvoir la fierte gaie rendent la vie plus facile aux gens prises avec une societe et une famille qui n'ont aucune sympathie.

Malheureusement je crois que ce livre tres dur n'a perdu rien de son pertinence depuis son lancement en 1964.

[Emanuela Siqueira · Rating 4 out of 5]

Um deserto que vale atravessar para pensar como chegamos na Annie Ernaux e na escrita de francesas que se encenam na palavra. Ler a Leduc é pensar no parentesco que ela faz com Duras e outras. Escrevi sobre o livro na Suplemento Pernambuco http://suplementopernambuco.com.br/re...

[Tslyklu · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Oh, Violette Leduc" is now my inner monologue refrain for making terrible decisions with complete self-awareness and stubbornness.

"Her desires were like farewells"

[Hetian bias · Rating 5 out of 5]

this is my Roman Empire.

[Salomé · Rating 4 out of 5]

Très beau, très bien écrit, très relatable.

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

An exquisitely written existential, feminist masterpiece. A tantalizing and tumultuous descent down the rabbit hole, journeying through the author’s personal trials set against the escalation and onslaught of WWII and occupied France. Shocking in places, even by today's sexual mores, the loathing and longing in this story brought me to tears at several points - overwhelmed by such brutal honesty told with unflinching self-analysis and insight. ‘Dear reader’, you will be inextricably changed.

[Mary Kathryn · Rating 4 out of 5]

A gorgeous but heartrending portrait of a dyke born before her time. Her languid experimental prose rises to sensuous heights when she's describing her relationships with women, but the 2nd half of the book, where her ego gets the better of her and she sets her sights on a wealthy and cultured gay man, is harder to stomach.

[Jonathan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some great stuff here, and obviously important for its subject matter and time of writing, but I confess to growing a little weary of the woe-is-me-isms and all the accompanying poetic hyperbole after a while.

[Ant · Rating 5 out of 5]

now rereading, and will add notes when able to compare two views from fourteen years apart.

the ghost of it has sustained me during those years.

[Allison Floyd]

Me: Uncle, uncle, uncle!

P. 135: I win.

I lack la stamina for this extreme of navel-gazing, no matter how sparkly the lint.