Response to Anon: 10 books about queer women

[breathedout]

Anonymous asked: If you were going to suggest ten fictional books about queer women, which ten would you suggest??

Honestly, it would depend a lot on the person to whom I was suggesting them. I’m only too thrilled to give my personal top-10 list of works of fiction involving queer women, but first some caviats about where I’m coming from:

• As tired as I am of the “tragic queer” stereotype, I do not share Tumblr’s penchant for happy happy happy all the time queers (or characters of any stripe). I myself am a queer who is not happy happy happy—or even remotely admirable—all the time, and I find the most solace in works that explore moral ambiguity and refuse to provide simplistic answers to tough questions. Simplistic answers do indeed come in both grim and cheerful flavors, but nothing sours in my mouth worse than a forced-feeling happy ending, ymm(and probably does)v.
• I don’t, as a general rule, read YA fiction or sci-fi/fantasy, so can’t really rec them.
• I get off on stylistic experimentation. It can certainly fail, but for me, all other things being equal, it’s an exciting plus rather than a minus to be overcome.
• I’m not awesome on racial diversity in my literary back-catalog, though I’m working to remedy that.

Still with me? Here, in no particular order, are my top 10 queer-lady-involving pieces of fiction, with snippets on why I love them:

1. The Night Watch, by Sarah Waters. My favorite Waters by far, which will come as no surprise to folks who have read How the mouth changes its shape. I love the WWII and post-war London setting; I love the intense emotional ambiguity of the relationships (particularly the Kay/Helen/Julia triangle); I adore what Waters does with the reverse-chronological storytelling technique, wherein the novel starts in 1947 and works its way back to 1941. I also love that there is explicit f/f sex in this book that’s harsh and emotionally complicated.

2. Hood, by Emma Donoghue. I treasure this book for its understated, keenly-observed meditations on grief and the mourning process, and how that process doesn’t erase any of the emotional complexity of the relationships the dead leave behind. As I said in this post, it’s a story about a queer woman dealing with tragedy, but it is not a story about a Tragic Queer—and the existence of the former kind of story slakes a tremendous thirst.

3. Stone Butch Blues, by Leslie Feinberg. The novel that made me re-think my early aversion to butch/femme, and also provided an early example of an explicitly political (in this case working-class/pro-union) piece of fiction that still works on a character level. Jess’s coming-of-age amongst factory butches, pro-femmes, and people to whom gender “had not come easily” is difficult to put down and harder to forget.

4. The Color Purple, by Alice Walker. Celie’s coming-of-age is even harsher than Jess’s, and Walker doesn’t flinch from it; but neither does she deny the humanity of anyone concerned. She instead turns tropes involving love triangles and unforgivable trespass on their heads, maintains always and against great odds the potential of human communication, and gives Celie an eventual flowering that allows her to become her own, fully-realized person, informed but not defined by the abuses she’s suffered. It sounds pat when I summarize it like that, but in actuality it’s anything but.

5. Nightwood, by Djuna Barnes. This novel is unapologetically strange in almost every way, and I adore it for that. Its aesthetic was instrumental in helping me to cotton onto queer coding, and I love the way it constantly hovers over the borderline separating the alluring from the grotesque. It’s way over the top and revels in being so. Cross-dressing doctors and love-lorn lesbians howling at each others’ feet. The female modernist Parisian-expat version of a John Waters film.

6. Mrs Dalloway, by Virginia Woolf. This is probably my favorite novel of all time, and Clarissa has organized her entire inner erotic life around the memory of her kiss with Sally Seton, so I have to include it. The reasons it’s so important to me extend FAR beyond the Clarissa/Sally dynamic, however, and words generally fail me when I try to express them. I love it for the way it honors the sanctity of the inner life; for how it opened my eyes to the amazing possibilities of experimental narrative fiction; for its shining moments of human connection in the face of its characters’ all-too-evident flaws, pettinesses and tragedies. One will never be wholly content; one will never be wholly admirable; one is alone with one’s own shortcomings almost all of the time—and yet, and yet, one makes bits of beauty in the midst of it. Probably not an exaggeration to say this novel saved my life.

7. The Price of Salt, by Patricia Highsmith. Though The Price of Salt is famous for being the first lesbian pulp romance novel with a “happy ending” (which in this context means that nobody dies or goes mad at the end), I, predictably, actually love it for how ambiguous that ending, and indeed the entire preceding relationship between Therese and Carol, actually are. Highsmith is a master at producing in her readers a sort of queasy chill, which is pitch-perfect for her usual genre of psychological suspense but which also translates in a fascinating way to romance. I think this book walks all kinds of intriguing lines—is Carol sympathetic, or no? Are we meant to feel quite this uncomfortable about her cold maternalism toward Therese? Are we meant to root for Therese/Carol, or are we just deep enough inside Therese’s head that we want what she wants? ONLY YOU CAN TELL, dear reader.

8. No Exit, by Jean-Paul Sartre. Not on the standard queer lit roster, perhaps, but it is one of my favorite plays bar none, and one of the three main characters is indeed a lesbian (and her lesbianism is relevant to the, for lack of a better word, plot). The play is less “about” that than it is about the way we undermine our connections and make a Hell for ourselves through our human compulsion to dig into and exploit each others’ weakest points; but I think that makes it a good example of how a queer character can be well-integrated into a larger, non-queerness-specific artistic project. No Exit is obviously very dark, but I also find it both aesthetically elegant and gut-bustingly funny, so take that as you will.

9. Patience and Sarah, by Isabel Miller. Hey, not everything on this list is grim! Patience and Sarah is a tremendously sweet romance about a 19th-century New England farmer’s daughter who falls in love with the female Sunday School teacher and eventually moves out West with her to homestead. It is lovely and delightful, and escapes being saccharine through separate but equally well-realized narrative voices for its heroines, real-seeming characters both primary and secondary, and cheer unadulterated charm.

10. The Passion, by Jeanette Winterson. The first two thirds of this novel, in particular, contain some of the most beautiful language I have ever tasted upon the page; and the middle third, which is narrated by the cross-dressing, web-footed con artist Villanelle, brings to life both Napoleonic-era Venice, and the masked female Carnival-goer with whom Villanelle falls in love. I like the sort of lush, surreal, almost fairy-tale-like quality Winterson gets throughout much of this novel, and I love her unsparing insights into the human heart.

I hope you find something of interest here, Anon! :-D

Comments

[juushika]

Another archived posts I had open in my tabs for 20348294823 days, because I dig a good rec list. Nightwood is new to me and it's strangeness sounds super intriguing, so it went on my TBR; I may also read Hood, and I always appreciate the reminder to read more Woolf.

[breathedout]

I'm glad you got some things to add to your TBR! This is archived from ages ago & I've read so much good fiction about queer women in the meantime; maybe I should do another, updated version of this post. Thanks for reminding me about it!