Girl, Woman, Other
Read Something Queer: Girl, Woman, Other
Welcome to the first issue of Read Something Queer!
If you don’t know me, I’m Becca, and I’m a writer based in Brooklyn. And, as a disclaimer, I’m by no means an expert on queer lit—I’m just a bisexual who gets really excited about books. You can learn more about me and why I started this newsletter here if you’re interested.
As of now, the plan is to publish a new book review every Thursday. I’ll try to focus on the ones that are really good, or at least a regular amount of good, but I can promise that they’ll all be queer.
Anyway, I’m kicking things off with the best book I’ve read so far in 2020. I hope you enjoy it.
— Becca
Girl, Woman, Other by Bernadine Evaristo
Fiction, May 2019
Girl, Woman, Other tells the stories of 12 people, mostly Black, British women, of different social classes, generations, and backgrounds. They’re grouped into sets of three and in the first set alone, Evaristo gives us a lesbian playwright, a cynical teenager, and an ex-theatre producer who runs away to America to join a radical feminist commune.
Each of these stories could stand alone and still be great (even this short excerpt holds its own) but woven together, they’re incredible. I’m even inclined to agree with the countless reviewers who’ve called it “a symphony,” and I apologize to each and every one of them for mentally rolling my eyes at that description before reading.
It dives into Blackness, feminism, sexuality, privilege, and complex familial relationships in flowy, hybrid prose-poetry with sparse punctuation and line breaks that emotionally wrecked me at times.
It’s also deeply satisfying to watch the connections between the stories unfold. Each of them ties into at least one or two of the others in some way, though not all of the connections are immediately obvious. Realizing one particularly crafty tie gave me the same feeling I get when I watch a movie and figure out the twist before it’s revealed. Later, when I lent the book to my girlfriend, I didn’t even have to ask which page she was on when she announced that she’d figured something out.
I love books that push me to stay up for just one more chapter, then two chapters, then three, and this was the first one to do that in a while. Read it! Then tell me which story was your favorite and why it was Bummi’s.
Queer points:
+6 for The Last Amazon of Dahomey, a play about lesbian warriors
+7 for the aforementioned radical feminist lesbian commune
+11 for a very sweet, very queer couple in Hebden Bridge that met in a trans chat room
Buy it from The Lit. Bar or Harriett’s Bookshop
Becca! I just finished this book yesterday and it took my breath away. My favorite part about the novel is how the characters expand the natural limitations of our viewpoints. It's so easy to assume every BIPOC is a certain way, or that sexuality is black-and-white and stagnant instead of fluid. Evaristo challenges those oversimplified ways of seeing others, and the deep background of each character does exactly that.
I think my favorite trio of character was the Megan/Morgan, Harriet and Grace section. There was something so powerful about seeing three generations of women, how different but the same they all were, and understanding some of the inherited trauma/biases of their experiences and how those played out in later generations.
Great recommendation!