Good morning and happy Pride Month. In lieu of a rant about rainbow capitalism, here’s a tweet from two years ago that still gets me every time:
In other news, Lesbian Bar Project’s short documentary was just released on YouTube. I’m not sure how in-depth they can really go in 20 minutes, but the dozen shots of Cubbyhole in the trailer made me feel warm and fuzzy and I will be watching.
As a final note before the review, I, much like everyone else, watched Mare of Easttown over the weekend. As someone from eastern PA, it was nice to have some representation (of people who drink Rolling Rock and pronounce “water” like “wooder”) on screen. But my main qualm with the show was that it’s simply unrealistic for this woman to be straight:
I could go into more detail, but this essentially sums up my thoughts:
They really should’ve.
— Becca
With Teeth by Kristen Arnett
Fiction, June 2021
All I really knew going into With Teeth was that 1) I loved Kristen Arnett’s first novel, Mostly Dead Things, and 2) she described this one on Twitter as a “VERY GAY florida book.” Sold!
I picked it up while already tired and thought I’d just read a few chapters before bed, then ended up staying up until roughly 2 a.m. simply because I could not tear my eyes away from it.
Our narrator here is Sammie, an unhappily married woman and stay-at-home mom. She’s resentful of her wife, Monika, who’s often absent and cold, and at times confused by and scared of her son, Samson. Together, they’re an increasingly dysfunctional family, and their unraveling is what drives the story.
It’s also a very character-driven novel that essentially dissects Sammie from inside her own brain. She struggles to understand any of the people around her, but seems incapable of expressing her confusion or being honest about her feelings. She also makes objectively terrible decisions that are at times wildly uncomfy to read. We occasionally see these events re-told from the perspective of a side character, and these descriptions of Sammie’s actions made me want to crawl out of my own skin.
But a “likable” protagonist is certainly not the point here. Instead, it’s a close look at a sort of fucked-up person, and at what it looks like for a mother to be wholly unable to form a meaningful relationship with their own child.
It’s deeply sad and kind of terrifying. So terrifying, actually, that the fear of one day having children I don’t like was stuck in my head for days. It’s also very funny—a contradiction that will make perfect sense if you’ve ever read any of Arnett’s other fiction.
As promised, it’s incredibly gay, too. And it’s the rare kind of queer novel without a single coming out scene, or even an internal conflict over the protagonist’s queerness. Sammie struggles with basically everything else in her life, but the fact that she’s a lesbian isn’t a problem. And that’s a nice change of pace.
Thanks to Riverhead Books and NetGalley for the ARC!
Queer points:
+4 for a hot therapist
+11 for a nightmare lesbian double date near the end that Kristen described in one interview as a “dinner party from hell”
Buy it on Bookshop