#35: After Delores
On revenge fantasies, murder, and the new season of The L Word
Good morning!
I’m happy to be back in your inbox after an unplanned month-long hiatus that was mostly due to stress, but also because I was in a reading slump for a solid three weeks.
In the interim I obviously consumed a ton of other gay stuff, most notably the season two premiere of The L Word: Generation Q. Without posting spoilers, my main takeaways were that 1) Gigi and Bette have no business dating but I’ll still watch them kiss and 2) we all would’ve been better off if Finley had stayed in the midwest.
I had the delightful experience of watching it all unfold while surrounded by a theater full of other gays at a watch party hosted by Velly. If you’re not yet following them for queer events, I’d recommend rectifying that immediately @vellyapp.
Anyway, onto the book that got me out of the aforementioned slump. I read it in a day and a half and it reminded me that I do actually like to read. Magic.
— Becca
After Delores by Sarah Schulman
Fiction, 1988
Our unnamed narrator is a diner waitress on the Lower East Side with a drinking problem, a pearl-handled gun, and a broken heart. Her ex just left her for another woman, and she oscillates between wanting to get back together with that ex and wanting to shoot her ex’s new lover in the face. Maybe both!
The new lover’s name is Sunshine, and she sucks:
Sunshine had a loft in TriBeCa, invested her money, and developed a good-sized dildo collection. She wore tweed pants and expensive leather jackets. I know this because I have investigated her thoroughly.
These three sentences alone make After Delores an excellent post-breakup novel. But there’s even more to this book than that.
While in the midst of navigating her violent revenge fantasies, our heartbroken narrator meets a young go-go dancer she calls Punkette, who sells her a used answering machine stolen from her older girlfriend’s apartment. The older girlfriend, a charismatic actress named Charlotte, turns out to be married to a director named Beatriz. A whole mess ensues, and so does a murder.
I won’t give any more of the plot away, but the murder mystery really isn’t even the most compelling reason to pick up this book. Instead, it’s Schulman’s writing, which is brilliant and funny and digs right into what it feels like to have your heart smashed into a million pieces:
Even after I took a shower, I never smelled as good as she did. I had to settle for being a nicer person and what the hell does that mean?
Queer points:
+9 for the fact that our narrator has crushes on 1) a go-go dancer, 2) the dancer’s older lover, and 3) the older lover’s wife
+15 for a woman dressed as Priscilla Presley, with eight long nails and two short ones
Buy it on Bookshop, or pick up a copy at your local used bookstore