Nicola’s answer to “hi. i am a huge fan. i mean to teach The Blue Place or Slow River in the fall. your lesbian charac…” > Likes and Comments

why i said that aud was "broken" (and forgive me if i misremember): in The Blue Place, she has a terrible time committing. in Stay, she seems addicted to pain. and you portray her as constantly injured, battered -- quite literally "broken." physical damage -- and the ability to cope with it -- is directly addressed in Always. i don't know if you are familiar with v.i. warshawski: sara paretsky definitely puts her through the physical wringer.

so by broken here i don't mean in pieces, shattered, unable to stand, but heavily bruised, just like lore is bruised. lore takes her share of physical beatings too, by the way.

i have been wondering why these three hard-boiled female heroines written by feminist/queer authors are so physical, and take so much abuse. the scalzi explanation is quite good. do you think there may be other factors, like, say, a desire on the part of you and paretsky to equalize men and women, or an implicit acknowledgment that the society these women inhabit is hostile? (if you feel you already answered this, feel free to ignore!)

yes, i love the neither aud nor lori have sexual identity issues. that is so good. i'm sorry i haven't read Hild yet. english is not my first language and i'm a little intimidated by the medievalisms.

one last point: a lot of female mystery writers start off their novels with killed and violated women. you don't do that. paretsky doesn't do that. this is why i read you two and don't read the other ones. but is it possible that the violence your heroines endure (and, in the case of aud, happily dispense) is a counterpoint to the violence women endure in the killed-and-raped-victim mystery?

i forgot to thank you for engaging with my answer. thank you. you made my day.

I'm perfectly okay to think of Aud as occasionally battered--though she thinks of herself as flawless, an oiled machine cruising through life, seamless.

Eh, the delusions we have of ourselves :)

I designed HILD so that if you just go with the flow the meaning of words will become apparent in time. In other words, don't worry about the medievalisms!

I'm guessing the physical trails VI and Aud and Lore go through have more to do with the authors than our politics. Certainly I'm a physical person; I connect to the world through my body and so, to varying degrees, do my protagonists.

Given that fiction is all about turning up the heat--more sex, more danger, more drama--there will also be more physical effort and violence. Certainly in any fiction I write...

haha. of course aud thinks of herself as a lean mean machine. :)

okay, i'll plunge into Hild next.

so, i was going to assign The Blue Place for class. i want the violence. i think the violence is important. or maybe, just like you, i simply like it. in this sense, maybe Stay would be better... but it's also nice that Aud at the end gets the girl. :)

hey, i appreciate your engaging with me on these other novels when your heart must very much be on Hild right now. I really appreciate it.