Megan Milks
The smutty, the sublime, the mushroom metaphors:
romance, the Renee Gladman way.
My Lesbian Novel, by Renee Gladman,
Dorothy, A Publishing Project, 147 pages, $16.95
• • •
Renee Gladman’s new book, My Lesbian Novel, is on one level a romance, following two women as they face conflicts on their way to falling in love. The setup: June (our MC, or main character) has just run into Thena, whom she recognizes from a trip to London sixteen months earlier. Her response to Thena’s presence is elation, confusion, and heat, but the first problem is that June is ostensibly straight and has a boyfriend—even if he’s largely off-page on trips to . . . who cares. The real issue, though, is internal: June can’t remember how she met Thena, or what happened between them, because her mind has been taken over by mushrooms! (Not psychedelics—June uses fungal imagery as a metaphor for selective memory loss.) Whatever transpired with Thena, it has left June with massive feelings she doesn’t understand.
Then there’s the real real conflict, which permeates the book’s meta level: How does one write a lesbian romance if one is Renee Gladman, an experimental author and visual artist whose “unclassifiable” work (as it has been called) has for decades existed between life writing, philosophy, and flânerie, and in a state of almost total detachment from commercial publishing? Well, there’s the wink. Gladman may have begun this project with the idea of crafting a “normal,” “straightforward” romance—but what she has produced is anything but.
Instead, what we get is an interview. It imagines an ongoing conversation between a writer, “R” (a version of Gladman), and her unnamed interlocutor, “I,” about the lesbian romance that R is struggling to write. In her acknowledgments note, Gladman describes I as “an amalgam of the sweet, attentive, and intelligent men who’ve passed through my life, a few having actually interviewed me.” But the letter “I” also implies the self, suggesting another incarnation of the author, so that My Lesbian Novel reads as a self-interview that illuminates not just this endeavor but also the process and concerns of Gladman’s creative practice overall.
To say her books are “about” writing is not quite right: whether fiction or not (and they usually land either between or beyond categories), they enact writing; they perform it. Reading Gladman’s Ravicka tetralogy is like watching a minimalist city get assembled around us as we turn the pages—language laid bare as architecture, story as wandering line. In more essayistic works, like Calamities, a sequence of daily reports, and TOAF (To After That), a nonfictional account of an unpublished novella, Gladman creates strange, exhilarating loops between writing and life.
My Lesbian Novel is a brilliant fusion of improvisational narrative and aesthetic treatise. It’s fiction and not. It’s also a hoot. And even (eventually) hot—with charm, it swirls horniness with helplessly nerdy literariness. This is Gladman’s most direct and, taking place in a known and recognizable city (New York), most concrete work of fiction. My Lesbian Novel is her longest, too: which is to say, still relatively short, at 147 pages, albeit roomier than one might expect from the size of its spine.
“You’re writing the novel as we talk?” the interviewer asks. “We talk then I write,” R replies. Their bursts of conversation goad R to add scenes to her romance—passages that, adopting June’s introspective perspective, are slotted into the interview, typeset in italics. Most novels hide the gaps in writing time to present the story as untarnished by the labor of writing. One of Gladman’s hallmarks is to integrate these ripples into her work, and she does so here through the interview. “Do you mind if I say how long it’s been since we met?” I asks. “Sure,” R replies. “Fuck it.” We learn she began the book in 2018 with the intention of writing a lesbian novel that, in contrast to most others she had read, ends with the romantic protagonists “together and happy and sexy!” At the time, she tells her interlocutor, “I had no idea there was a lesbian romance genre full of Happily Ever Afters, HEAs, like hundreds of books.” Upon discovering this, she abandoned the manuscript and started reading in the genre. Five years have since passed.
The effect is that we seem to be reading the book as it is being written. Whereas Gladman/R’s other novels have been driven by a wandering impulse, to write a romance, she understands that “the path has to be more defined.” If she wants June and Thena to meet and ultimately get together, she needs to provide more setup than she usually does. “How many scenes do you think one needs to make a novel?” I wonders. R challenges the question (“How could one rule cover all the needs of narrative?”) before adjusting it: “I think, though, what you’re asking is how few scenes can you have and still call what you’ve written a novel?” These and other aesthetic problems—in essence, the question of how to make this book—drive the plot of My Lesbian Novel. As she articulates them, with the help of probing, encouraging I, R finds her way through.
It would be easy to describe the romance as “housed” within the interview; more accurately, these two lines of thinking meet and touch and spur each other on. Gladman delivers some narrative details inside the Q&A, leaving June’s passages to take on a more exploratory mode. From within June’s point of view, we understand her to be an affluent New Yorker with an occasionally Gladmanian way of phrasing things (“I’m looking out of my face at passersby,” she tells us while walking the city). But much of her broad-strokes characterization comes via the conversation, where we learn that June is “progressive” with “wild hair.” “Is she African-American?” the interlocutor asks. (Gladman is.) R responds: “I don’t know yet.”
My Lesbian Novel is full of pleasures. There’s pleasure in soaking up Gladman’s supplely ponderous, sneakily hilarious prose, and her always stimulating ideas about language and writing. There’s pleasure in spending time with R and I and their chummy, teasing dynamic (I: “Are you smirking?” R: “No. Of course not.”). The greatest pleasure of all may be Gladman’s alternately enthused and withering takes on the tropes of lesbian romance novels, a genre of which she’s now essentially a scholar. In studying them, she’s learned not only “how much people who are not writing experimental novels have their characters eat pizza and watch TV,” but also how much these characters roll or narrow or dilate their eyes (“there’s a lot about the eyes in general”). She loathes miscommunication drama—“people misunderstanding each other, not being honest, not asking questions, acting out of fear. I hate all that shit.” What she loves is a good Hurt/Comfort: “I am a sucker for women carrying each other around.”
There’s pleasure, too, in witnessing the energy field of want swell around June as it leads her toward Thena. It’s a peculiar delight to watch Gladman, a writer known for charging past fiction’s pretenses, build a convincing love story through a handful of passages suspended within a broad-ranging, writerly interview. Gladman’s romance is both cheekily trope-y and not at all—full of fungal imagery and arresting turns of phrase—finally arriving at an aching last encounter that swings giddily between the smutty and the sublime. How many scenes does a lesbian novel need? Just this one, and the lines of desire it takes to get us there.
Megan Milks is the author of the novel Margaret and the Mystery of the Missing Body, finalist for a 2022 Lambda Literary Award, and Slug and Other Stories, both published by Feminist Press.