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Across the Page: Books of Discovery

In many ways, all three of this month’s books are about discovery: Passing for Black, Linda Villarosa’s debut novel about a young woman coming out; Live Through This, an anthology of stories about the precarious relationship between creativity and self-destruction, edited by Sabrina Chapadjiev; and According to Her Contours, lesbian poet Nancy Boutilier’s first collection of poetry, published in 1992.

Passing for Black by Linda Villarosa (Dafina Books)

Linda Villarosa’s compelling debut novel, Passing for Black, begins with an epigraph from Nella Larsen: “She wished to find out about this hazardous business of ‘passing,’ this breaking away from all that was familiar and friendly to take one’s chances in another environment, not entirely strange, perhaps, but not entirely friendly.”

In Passing for Black, Angela Wright is on the brink of discovery. By the looks of it, life couldn’t be better – she is engaged to Keith, a professor of African-American history, is relatively close with her family, and has a successful career as a journalist. According to her shrewd best friend, Mae, she couldn’t ask for more.

Angela agrees with Mae’s assessment, but beneath the surface she struggles with very real insecurities and questions about her life, including her sexuality (“I am not gay-lesbian-bisexual questioning. I am a straight heterosexual American) and issues of race (“Though I had been ‘black born black’ for almost thirty years, every day I wrestled with the tyranny of striving for authenticity”).

Though Angela has spent years working through these questions, it is not until she meets Cait, a white woman and a professor of queer studies at the same university where Keith teaches, that she is forced to try to find some answers.

Passing for Black is filled with realistically flawed characters who either interfere with or contribute to Angela’s growth. Angela’s mother is able to fight for the rights of African-American transgender men and women, but is unable to see her own daughter’s need for an advocate. Likewise, Cait is so blinded by her own struggle for equal rights that she fails to recognize her own prejudices.

Villarosa does not shy away from controversy, and Passing for Black takes an honest look at the concept of “passing” within both the queer and African-American communities – the internal and external influences that make people feel like they need to or should pass, and the impact that this has on the spirit.

Author Linda Villarosa

Passing for Black is a rich exploration of Angela’s journey and, ultimately, how she is able to determine her identity for herself – not merely as a reaction to or against the people in her life. It is an engaging, sexy and thought-provoking read.

 

Live Through This: On Creativity and Self-Destruction, edited by Sabrina Chapadjiev (Seven Stories)

Sabrina Chapadjiev first decided to put together Live Through This, a collection of stories, essays, artwork and photography about the connection between creativity and self-destruction, when she heard of the suicide of Sarah Kane, a young playwright. A playwright herself, Kane’s death forced Chapadjiev to consider her own relationship with these two forces. Even more specifically – and more frightening – she wondered if she was headed down a similar path.

Chapadjiev began to notice that many of the women artists she admired were also scarred: “It got to the point where it became logical: If a woman was fiercely intelligent, outspoken and passionate, I’d look towards her arms for the scars. They were almost always there.”

In the construction of the book, however, Chapadjiev was also aware of the media’s fixation on “tragically doomed women” and the “glamorization of this issue.” What she was more interested in capturing – and what she succeeded in creating with Live Through This – was a book about the women who struggled with self-destruction and turned it into art.

One of the challenges she faced, she explains in the book’s preface, was how to define self-destruction. She finally limited it to “when a woman actively takes away from herself or her power.” Many of the pieces also explore the circumstances behind these acts, including incest, depression, drug abuse and eating disorders.

Within this fairly broad definition, Live Through This features stories and images from a wide range of women writers and artists. Carol Queen’s essay “Long, Long Thoughts” shows how losing her virginity to an unworthy suitor inspired her to become a feminist sex educator.

Daphne Gottlieb’s “Lady Lazarus: Uncoupleting Suicide and Poetry” explores her battle with depression (and the medication to treat it) and its impact on her writing. Diane DiMassa’s comic “The Artful Art of the Role of Art in the Ugly Art of Survival” shows how she learned to work out her “ANGER!” on the page.

One of the more powerful essays in the anthology is playwright Carolyn Gage’s “Rewriting the Script.” The essay begins with the question “How on earth can you tell a story you can’t remember?” and then proceeds to put together the pieces of an abusive childhood, a marriage to a man and participation in a homophobic church, and Gage’s eventual coming-out and emergence as a playwright.

In the end, Chapadjiev’s goal was to change the stigma behind the connection between self-destruction and creativity: “We have been taught that self-destruction is an awful thing. ‘It is bad,’ we’ve been told by therapists, psychologists, and those who do not understand its seduction. I would like to edit that. Instead of ‘It is bad,’ I would like for it to read, ‘It is.'”

This powerful collection of voices provides new insight into the concept of self-destruction and, perhaps more importantly, offers hope to everyone who has felt these forces.

According to Her Contours by Nancy Boutilier (Black Sparrow Press)

When Nancy Boutilier published her first collection of poems, According to Her Contours, in 1992, she was quickly recognized for her strong voice and contribution to lesbian poetry. The book was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Poetry, as was her second collection, On the Eighth Day Adam Slept Alone.

A high school English teacher and athletic director, Boutilier’s poems take on a variety of subjects, from the classroom to the basketball court to matters of the heart. According to Her Contours is divided into five sections: “Third Person,” “To Throw Like a Boy,” “Relationships Blossom,” “Love Flowers” and “The Goddess Smiles.”

Poetry may seem like a strange place to explore the body and mind of an athlete, but this is exactly where Boutilier is at her best. In the poem “To Throw Like a Boy,” she describes her growth into womanhood despite her desire to be “one of the guys” on the field.

In “A Child’s Logic,” Boutilier re-examines that desire and how she came to a new understanding about herself:

Child’s logic told me

I wanted to be a boy

when all I wanted was to love

and be loved

by girls.

Many of the poems in the collection also reveal Boutilier’s struggle with an eating disorder and an athlete’s obsession with trying to mold the perfect body. In “Charting Progress,” she writes about her first year in college:

Felt giddy

Beautiful

Lettuce

no fat

bones.

The book takes a turn in “Relationships Blossom” as Boutilier experiences her first kiss (“soon I think of nothing but your tongue”) and comes to terms with her lesbianism (“My mother would die to see me/In the arms of another woman,/But I had to see for myself”).

The poems in According to Her Contours are powerful meditations on identity, power, loss and redemption.

 

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