The First Bad Man by Miranda July: This book is a delightfully weird experience. Full of cringe moments, bizarre fantasies, and the ugly magic of an un-extraordinary life. This book explores the weird, embarrassing, deeply funny moments of being a person through the eyes–and the overactive imagination–of this eccentric, queer, lonely woman.
The Liar’s Club by Mary Karr: A beautiful telling of a childhood haunted by a mother’s demons. This memoir works to balance grace with accountability as Karr relates the tumultuous path of her growing up. Heartbreaking and hopeful, with a touch of Texas humor, this book navigates difficult memories with tenderness and sagacity
Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? by Jeanette Winterson: An electric and deeply felt autobiography. Winterson explores the queer experience as a child adopted into an unusual and difficult home of a Christian doomsday zealot of a mother; despite the traumas of her childhood, she works to find ways to forgive her adopted mother, heal the wounds her biological mother left her with, and seek something resembling happiness with the help of literature and poetry. Stunning, sad, heartfelt, and philosophical, this book creates and explores an entire realm of feeling. A must-read for fans of Winterson’s fiction, this work sheds a whole new light on the author and her remarkable life.
The Member of the Wedding by Carson McCullers: A surprising and exploratory novel of belonging. Mccullers is masterful in this adolescent search for inclusion, and is probing of gender and racial identity. Tender and insightful, Mccullers is ahead of her time with this queer coming-of-age piece.
One Writer’s Beginning by Eudora Welty: Less an instruction on writing and more an exploration of the world that inspired her, Welty’s autobiographical piece reflects on her childhood experiences, a bygone era, and her family structure that inspired so much of her work. She speaks on the ways she learned to give attention to the world around her, the connections she made, and her journey to find her own voice within it all.
My Autobiography of Carson McCullers by Jenn Shapland: A tender, intimate blend of biography and memoir that affirms generations of queer femmes. This book is a living (or a lived) kind of biography: Shapland’s quest to understand this beloved author’s life does not consist only of the facts she finds, but of her own sensory experiences in the process of finding. Shapland sees her own lived queer experiences, her own loves, her own chronically ill body, in the artifacts of McCullers’s life; she recognizes the shadows that queer femmes live(d) in, and brings the history of their love and community to light. This book ventures to know a woman that history has shrouded in a forced, heteronormative narrative; by making these connections, by bringing these archives to life through her own experience, Shapland affirms generations of queer women whose love has been deemed ‘imaginary.’ I saw myself in Shapland’s process of finding, just as I saw myself in McCullers’ fictional Frankie or Mick when I was young, closeted, and searching for something I couldn’t name. This book is an embodied biographical discovery of queer ancestry, of reading between the lines to find the love that wasn’t hiding after all
The Faggots & Their Friends Between Revolutions by Larry Mitchell: A fun and lewd queer mythology. It explores through its playful fairy-tale tone the euphoria, pain, loneliness, and beauty of queer bodies, queer survival, queer desire.
It Chooses You by Miranda July: A hugely funny, insightful, and playful glimpse into the human condition. July uses the bizarre method of tracking down junk posted in the PennySaver to understand what it means to be lonely, creative, beautiful, and human.
Outlawed by Anna North: My dad raised me on westerns–stories of cowboys, outlaws, wanderers. As a queer femme adult, I’ve never found one that was quite as fun to read as this one. This book was so affirming in its representation of queer existence & resistance in history. The characters are compelling, visionary, and tough as hell. It was hard not to read the whole thing in one sitting!
Understand Me, Sugar by Jane V. Blunschi: A funny and challenging collection that plays with the complications of desire in its various forms. These characters are yearning for something that will most likely bring their comfortable world crashing down around them. They make decisions driven by infatuation or impulse, and it ultimately leads to more dissatisfaction. The women of these stories express patterns of self-destruction under the guise of actualization; they’re understandable in their desire for change, but behave in ways that alienate them from the people around them–and likely from the reader as well. Intelligent, cheeky, and honest, this collection has made its way into my favorites.
The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson: An intriguing queer found family story amongst the horrors of heteronormative family structures. The women, in particular, are victims of this compulsory system, although the men seem to suffer from it in their own ways. The lesbian-coded sister and her “companion,” Theo and her “housemate,” Nellie and her feelings that she can’t quite put words to; they all seek to find family outside of the normal blood-bonds in ways that are doomed to exist in the shadows. The story is playful, heart-wrenching, and of course, haunting.
honey gaze 