My Lesbian Novel [Paperback]

The latest in writer and visual artist Renee Gladman’s ever-expanding body of imaginative investigation is a sui generis novel of queerness and art-making, philosophy and sex.

The narrator of My Lesbian Novel is Renee Gladman, an artist and writer who has produced the same acclaimed body of experimental art and prose as real-life Renee Gladman, and who is now being interviewed by an unnamed interlocutor about a project in process, a seeming departure from her other works, a lesbian romance. 
 
Between reflections on art making and on the genre of lesbian romance—“though aspects of the formula drive me crazy . . . people who write these stories understand how beautiful women are”—a romance novel of her own takes shape on the page, written alongside the interview, which sometimes skips whole years between questions, so that time and aging become part of the process. 
 
The result is a beautifully orchestrated dialogue between reflection and desire, or clarity and confusion, between the pleasures of form and the pleasures of freedom in the unspooling of sentences over time.“My Lesbian Novel refuses to settle the question of the visible: life ends, but writing never really does, and Gladman has followed a sentence that moves us around corners as we read it.” —Charles Theonia, BOMB “Editor’s Choice”

“My Lesbian Novel takes on a new genre for Gladman, the Happily Ever After, a romance in which you know that the lovers will find their way. This requires Gladman to set up two couples: as she figures out how to get June and Thena into each other’s arms, she also arranges a marriage between romance and literary fiction. . . . Gladman has always bel³P