For the past few years, I have been engaged in an intense argument with myself. This argument reached a climax last May, a few moments after I saw the film I Saw the tv Glow at the E Street Cinema in downtown Washington, D.C. I remained seated as the credits rolled, and then as the lights came on and a few theater employees shuffled in with brooms and dustpans to prepare the space for the next showing. I finally rose after one of those employees leveled a stern but understanding gaze in my direction, and slowly made my way up the hallway, past the signs for other shows and gatherings, the combined, discordant soundtrack of varied pictures buffeting my ears.
I absolutely loved that movie. I loved it so much that I wondered if there was something lacking in my assessment of the film, if perhaps my appreciation for it had been influenced by some external factor—the fact a few critics I follow had recommended it, or even that I’d managed to find some spare hours to watch it, an act that was itself worthy of celebration, considering the intensity of my schedule. I also contemplated the idea that I loved the film simply because I have engaged with many of its themes in my fiction and criticism—the meaning and nature of reality, the all-consuming pleasures of nineties television shows (my poison of choice is Star Trek: The Next Generation), the myriad ways that adolescent isolation can scar you and destabilize your journey to adulthood.
Yet I knew these were all false leads. I loved the movie because of what I had seen on the screen, the gorgeous, rigorously crafted scenes, the thought-provoking set pieces, and—most importantly—the story. I had been utterly captivated by the plot, about a young man who feels detached and estranged from his community and develops a friendship with a young woman who feels much the same. She introduces him to a television show called The Pink Opaque (the show is obviously influenced by Buffy the Vampire Slayer), and he instantly grows besotted with it; over time, his experience with and understanding of reality begins to merge with the constructed world of the show.
Tucked beneath my love and appreciation for I Saw the tv Glow was my realization that one side had finally conquered the other in the long-running debate I’d been having with myself. It took me a few days to verbalize my conclusion, but once I did, I knew it was incontrovertibly true: I had reached a point in my life where I enjoyed contemporary cinema much more than I enjoyed contemporary literature.
I have always loved movies and have often watched them with an ardor approaching religious devotion, but literature had always been the pinnacle, the very top of the art heap. Literature provided me with an entry point into the world and possibilities of art, long before I thought of literature as an art form, back during my lonely childhood days when I simply (and relentlessly) hunted the shelves of my public library for a good story. I appreciated that novels were always available to me, that I could simply pick up a book and submerge myself in an alternate realm.
Yet by the middle of 2024 my passion for literature had waned. In the weeks before I watched I Saw the tv Glow, I had seen two other films that I loved just as passionately: Perfect Days, directed by Wim Wenders, an intimate and extended portrait of a Tokyo-based janitor, and Evil Does Not Exist, Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s sobering tale about a rural community in Japan that struggles to resist an incursion by urban interlopers. These movies infiltrated me; they nestled within and refused to be dislodged; for days after watching them, stray images would surface as I attempted to reengage with my life. I felt like I had somehow become a citizen of these films—of the emotions and sensations they evoked—when I watched them, and afterward I was hesitant to return home.
I am not the kind of person who insists on assessing the health or viability of a particular field based on my subjective experience—I know there are countless things I will miss. I know it’s entirely possible I’ve skipped the song that will tip me into ecstasy, the painting that will prompt me to change the way I observe my environment, the novel that will change my life. I’d certainly had dry spells with literature before; indeed, almost a decade ago I wrote about my deep dissatisfaction with then-current trends in African fiction. But they had never lasted so long. I continued to read dutifully for work and pleasure, and I frequently encountered sentences that impressed me, stories I admired. But nothing really moved my mind or heart.
I accepted that I was likely the issue. Though I’ve read many eulogies for the novel in recent years, each time I went to the bookstore I saw happy customers patiently thumbing through piles of paperbacks and hardbacks, and happier booksellers pointing to various corners where those customers could find more treasures. Every season a range of books earned plaudits for their popularity and innovation—despite all the depressing news about the dire state of the book business, it was apparent that people were still consuming and enjoying literature.
Shortly after watching I Saw the tv Glow, I also considered my place in the literary world as a writer, as an artist who aims to produce timeless and essential literature. Was there a place for me if nothing I read was knocking me down, if I hadn’t been inspired by anything I’d read in a long while? I wondered if literature was no longer my medium. Perhaps my artistic life had been building to this moment, when I would abandon literature for . . . the movies?
It was during this moment of literary estrangement that I picked up My Lesbian Novel by Renee Gladman. I should be honest at this juncture: I am in love with this book. I will attempt to objectively argue why I admire it so, why it has not only restored my faith in literature as an art form that can depict contemporary life in unexpected and innovative ways but has also provided me with a store of ideas for my own practice as a novelist. But objectivity is not my only goal. I also wish to convey why this book is so important to me.
My Lesbian Novel is fearless and funny; it is also a searching, penetrating document about the state of literature and a clever metafictional tale about love and art that never gets high on its supply. The primary engine of this novel is its self-awareness—we witness the story as it contorts, contracts, and expands in search of a framework, an appropriate container to encircle its sprawling ambitions, and Gladman’s false starts and abandoned storylines are just as captivating as her incremental accomplishments, which accumulate over the course of the novel until, at the end, the enormity of her achievement is apparent. Gladman also offers a path forward for autofiction, the most popular and tired literary movement of our modern literary era and, in so doing, demonstrates the intrinsic conservatism—in both aesthetic and political terms—of that genre. Finally, her novel advances an expansive and unsettling argument: that our reality is comprised of fiction. Examined against the backdrop of contemporary social and political events, Gladman’s novel offers a method of understanding and even responding to the manipulations of leaders who wish to fashion realities that will undermine and exclude most of us.
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The premise of My Lesbian Novel is simple enough, at least at first. A character named “R” speaks with a person called “I” about a book she’d like to write (the titular “lesbian novel”). In preparation for this project, R has read a raft of lesbian romances; as she consumes these books, she learns what she admires and abhors about the genre. She eventually begins to develop a story about a woman who is in a long-term relationship with a man—a relationship that seems to be winding down—and her burgeoning interest in a mysterious woman who has recently entered her life. R is unsure how to develop this plot, so she talks with her interlocutor about her various ideas and then attempts to write scenes based on what she learns about her work and herself from these conversations.
Gladman’s (and, of course, R’s) novel proceeds accordingly: I prods and cajoles R, R responds in kind, and then she drops paragraphs of italicized text—portions of her would-be novel—directly into the thread of their conversation. These novel excerpts are often out of sequence and at times contradict each other; if one were to extract these excerpts from the book and piece them together, they would not cohere.
This incoherence is one among many reasons My Lesbian Novel is so innovative and essential—Gladman relies on it to resist the commonly held notion that literature should aspire to perfection and unimpeachability, each plot point carefully conceived and immaculately executed, each sentence polished to a high sheen. In so doing, she brings the novel as an art form into conversation with other art forms that are reckoning (or have long reckoned) with the meaning and purpose of authenticity in art and rely on authenticity as another means of communicating crucial ideas.
The novel persists as perhaps the lone contemporary art form that consistently equates perfection, or the pursuit of perfection, with artistic achievement. Here I should pause to define a couple crucial terms: by perfection I mean the construction and maintenance of a hermetically sealed, contrived reality; I’m referring to a creation that has been fabricated to exist on its own terms apart from the influence of the world as we know it. And by authenticity, I mean art that acknowledges its own falseness, its unreality, the kind of art that, as a matter of principle, integrates the contrived with the real.
There are, of course, vital exceptions to this framework. Popular metafictional novels like The French Lieutenant’s Woman gesture toward the conventions of perfection even as they disrupt them, revealing the scaffolding behind the illusion. Still, such novels remain outliers—evidence not of changed norms, but of an enduring anxiety: that the novel’s contract with reality might be too rigid, too self-contained, to reflect the fractured world we now inhabit.
Various kinds of art occupy different zones on the perfect-to-authentic continuum, but even those art forms that seem to operate according to similar rules as novels are more authentic than they might appear. Take, for example, cinema. Although we often judge movies in a similar manner as novels—we assess whether their plots are well executed; how “believable” the characters are (which is to say, how well these characters abide by the logic of their cinematic world, as established by the writers and directors)—we’ve also grown accustomed to witnessing incursions of authenticity into these contrived realms. After watching a movie (or tv show) you might watch a blooper reel, during which the actors frequently “break character” and slough off their artificial personas. Or you might watch a commentary in which the people who made the film offer observations about how they shot a particular scene or overcame a burdensome challenge. We’re also privy to the swirl of information around a movie, news items about who was cast and why, how it was financed or problems with the script, about the various compromises a filmmaker made to complete the movie. Many tv shows are now followed by programs during which the writers and showrunners provide viewers with “behind the scenes” information.
Then there are art forms that conspicuously merge perfect and authentic, real and unreal—like paintings (two-dimensional renderings of three-dimensional phenomena) and sculptures (stationary renderings of mobile phenomena). Theater is also conspicuously authentic; while viewing a play you might see stagehands scurry onstage to change parts of the set, or an actor exit the stage only to return as a different character.
On the other hand, as a culture we typically maintain an inviolable line between the contents of our books and everything else. We might have access to a swirl of information about the production of a particular book—how much a publishing house paid for it, or if a particular character has a real life analogue—but its authenticity generally ends there. There’s no literary equivalent to a blooper reel; one cannot go to a bookstore to purchase a folio of rejected or abandoned paragraphs (critical editions sometimes offer this kind of material, but only retroactively—once a book has already been absorbed into the canon). In addition, as of yet, books are not sold with commentaries in which an author discusses at length the decisions they made at each juncture of their composition process.
I can anticipate a few responses—hey, weirdo, you might say, it’s a very good thing that books strive for perfection. I would say that in general it is a good thing, and if a writer desires to craft a story that is so compellingly conceived, so carefully composed, that a reader can take refuge from the concerns and dramas of their own lives by picking up their book, well, as you were. I would also say, however, that for many contemporary readers, such books seem less real, and less responsive to our daily lives precisely because they are so meticulously constructed. The book’s perfection can become a distraction, a reminder that it was conceived to divert attention from reality rather than engage it.
In this vein, one of my favorite sections of Gladman’s book occurs at about a fourth of the way in, when R and her interlocutor have a conversation about time—the time it takes to compose a novel, and how time shapes, bends, and contorts the production of art:
I: So, I think we should begin today by informing the reader that there’s been a considerable break in time since we last met.
R: Oh, that’s interesting. Why should we do that?
I: Well, I was thinking how when we read novels there’s no real record of the time in which the novel was written. The pages run so smoothly, are so ordered, we probably don’t put much thought to it. But since I’m talking to you as you build this novel, it seems like we’re providing an opportunity for the reader to actually know how long a novel takes to be written and whether it’s written with or without interruption.
R: Some novels are written fast. I’ve heard people talk about writing as a fever dream [. . .]
I: Do you mind if I say how long it’s been since we met?
R: Sure. Fuck it.
I: When I first suggested we should tell the reader how much time had passed, it had only been a couple months. But after you asked why I wanted to do that and I said it offers readers a glance into the time of writing, five years have passed. It’s phenomenal.
R: We are still here. So much has happened.
R has folded the passage of time into the unfolding plot of her book. Time, of course, is our most precious resource, and especially so for writers, who are forever scanning their crowded calendars for stray pockets in which they can settle so they can do their work. Most writers must take on other occupations to fund their artistic ambitions, and sometimes the gap between productive sessions can stretch over the course of years. The common practice is to segregate this and other inconvenient facts from their novels. They might inform an interviewer about their struggles to find a few hours to write, and even how difficult it can be to focus when you finally happen on an empty pocket of time, unexpectedly or otherwise, but typically these are anecdotes that hover around the book, a fog of data that does not interact with the unique weather system of the story they are selling. Even in autofiction, a genre that has afforded many authors the opportunity to muse at length about the various facets of writing, writer’s block and external distractions are conveyed to the reader as aspects of the story. For example, in Drifts, Kate Zambreno’s alluring, autofictional tale about a writer who is trying to write a novel, the protagonist muses about recent artistic struggles:
In the summer of 2015, I was supposed to be at work on Drifts, a book I had been under contract for almost as long as I had lived in this city, renting the first floor of a shabby Victorian house in a tree-lined neighborhood so remote it was almost a suburb. The title of the book came from a feeling, and I wanted to write through this feeling. What I really wanted was to write my present tense, which seemed impossible. How can a paragraph be a day, or a day a paragraph? But I couldn’t often exist in this room, or even in this paragraph, now. I found myself always distracted.
One could perhaps argue that Gladman is doing the same, that the five-year gap her interlocutor prompts her to disclose is merely another component of her story, clever and disorienting though it may be. This could well be true, but R’s disclosure feels distinct for two reasons: first, this novel does not contain a story as such; it is, instead, a story about a story, or—more accurately—it’s a conversation about a story. So, R’s admission isn’t advancing a particular plotline, nor undermining one; it is, instead, part of an exchange she is having with another person. Conversations work quite differently from stories, both as rhetorical structures for disseminating information and in terms of their formal requirements. Conversations require both parties to attend and respond to the information they receive from the other person and shape their responses accordingly. Furthermore, a conversation possesses an internal logic that is distinct from the narrative logic that powers stories. Stories typically rely on a causal sequence of events: something happens and then, because it happened, something happens after that. As a story progresses, and as characters take some actions and avoid others, the range of possible future actions narrows (just like in life). Causality is also important in conversations—someone responds to a question because someone else asked it—but nestled in each question and response are a range of alternate routes, prompts for unexpected rhetorical journeys. R’s interlocutor asks about the time gap and R addresses it; suddenly the conversation is about that and not what they were discussing before.
Second, the conversational conceit that serves as the organizing framework of this novel forces R to engage with information in a much more rigorous and dialectical manner than she likely would if she were merely disclosing this information herself. Her interlocutor doesn’t allow her to simply mention that she hasn’t worked on her book for a significant amount of time; she prods R to reveal what she has done in the interim, why she effectively abandoned the book, and the strategies she might employ to start afresh. R does not seem to be in control of the information that she offers to the reader; to the contrary, she divulges this information because someone asked her.
In rejecting narrative coherence and embracing process, fragmentation, and collaboration, Gladman shows how fiction might evolve beyond its perfectionist tendencies—how it might become a more destabilizing and inclusive form.
Indeed, as I read this book, it occurred to me that Gladman’s reliance on a conversation as the engine of this book, and not narrative, could also serve as a critique of the limits of storytelling as a means of communicating the experiences of marginalized populations. Throughout this book, R expresses a fair bit of disappointment about the strictures of the romance literary genre:
I knew all the tropes. I’d read hundreds of books. Could name all the popular authors. I could talk in detail about “ordinary” human emotion. I learned a lot about what femme lesbians wear, according to these authors. The kinds of heels a high-fashion lesbian would wear. I learned how much people who are not writing experimental novels have their characters eat pizza and watch TV. It was like getting a tour through a kind of living that had eluded me before. I was always weird—even as a kid—living a weird life.
R conceives of this book as her opportunity to tell a different kind of story, one that can accommodate her own unique experiences as a gay Black woman and simultaneously stretch beyond the limited parameters of genre.
By embracing conversation over narrative, Gladman subtly challenges the idea that marginalized lives can or should be shaped to fit the linear, causal frameworks of conventional fiction. The romance novels R reads—and rejects—offer characters whose lives progress through recognizable stages: attraction, complication, resolution. But what if your story, as a queer Black woman, contains ruptures and contradictions that resist easy resolution? What if your reality, lived at the edges of accepted norms, can’t be translated into plot without distortion? In such a case, conversation becomes not only an alternative form but a necessary one—an open-ended, dialectical process that resists the flattening effects of traditional storytelling.
In this respect, R joins a growing crop of writers who, in recent years, have been casting about for new ways to express themselves on the page. Many writers have settled on autofiction as a means of accomplishing this. Though autofiction is a notoriously nebulous term, it contains within itself the qualities that many readers and writers have been yearning for in literature—stories that possess an autobiographical sheen and autobiography that ventures into fictional territory. My Lesbian Novel certainly possesses autofictional qualities—R’s life seems quite similar to Gladman’s, and R frequently namechecks people in Gladman’s life. Yet as I was reading My Lesbian Novel, for the first time it occurred to me that—despite all the recognition autofiction writers have received for their innovative leaps and willingness to unsettle narrative conventions—autofiction is actually quite conservative.
Autofiction has been celebrated for many reasons, but among them is the fact that many artists working in this genre seem committed to the process of rendering reality by accumulating quotidian details. Critics and readers have celebrated writers like Karl Ove Knausgaard, Jenny Offill, and Rachel Cusk for describing the lives of their protagonists in exacting, intimate precision. For example, here’s a passage from Book 1 of My Struggle by Knausgaard:
Inside, it is a question of getting through the morning, the three hours of diapers that have to be changed, clothes that have to be put on, breakfast that has to be served, faces that have to be washed, hair that has to be combed and pinned up, teeth that have to be brushed, squabbles that have to be nipped in the bud, slaps that have to be averted, rompers and boots that have to be wriggled into, before I, with the collapsible double stroller in one hand and nudging the two small girls forward with the other, step into the elevator, which as often as not resounds to the noise of shoving and shouting on its descent, and into the hall where I ease them into the stroller, put on their hats and mittens and emerge onto the street already crowded with people heading for work and deliver them to the nursery ten minutes later, whereupon I have the next five hours for writing until the mandatory routines for the children resume.
These writers, in other words, express a tacit acceptance, and sometimes—when their narratives dissolve into mere lists and transcripts and emails, and the rest of the detritus of our daily lives—an active celebration of reality. A veneration of our reality. Even if the characters in these novels are unsatisfied with their circumstances, these novels usually do not question the foundations of our reality, the manner in which it is constructed and, of course, the people who have benefitted from the way it has been constructed. The assumption undergirding these novels is that reality is more or less fixed, and that achieving success or happiness or falling in love depends on figuring out how to master the rules of our present order.
What’s striking is that autofiction’s radicalism often stops at the sentence level. It lists and destabilizes, but it rarely challenges the idea that the world, as it exists, is the proper container for the story. The characters don’t need to adapt to or remake reality because reality was conceived for them and their work. Gladman, however, dismembers the novel’s architecture to show that the container itself—the very notion of narrative coherence—is a form of constraint.
Gladman joins an emerging and creatively ambitious cohort of writers—including Akwaeke Emezi and Zinzi Clemmons—who have instead reshaped and distended autofiction to serve their reality-bending purposes and to account for the fact that reality, as presently constituted, does not contain adequate space for them. Like other autofiction novels, My Lesbian Novel conforms to and comments upon the real life of its creator, but it is also aware of itself as a burgeoning and evolving art form.
R: . . . What’s your memory of when we started this?
I: Oh! You’re talking about the interview, too?
R: In my mind, there is little distinction.
I: Then I’m not sure I have the capacity to answer you.
R: What do you mean?
I: Well . . . if I were here when you began this novel, since I was the one asking you about it, wouldn’t I have known you had the years mixed up? Although, I guess both could have experienced the same lapse in memory. I’m just trying to avoid things getting awkward around what’s inside the frame of the book and what’s outside . . . Do you think we just broke the fourth wall?
R: I’m not sure there was one to begin with. Did you do this when you were a kid? Knock something over by accident then slink away before anyone notices.
I: Oh! You want us to pretend we didn’t just find this big glitch?
R: And be historically inaccurate?! No way.
This book isn’t venerating reality at all; to the contrary, R is showing us where the fissures and sutures are in this book, she is showing us where the reality of this book frays and dissolves into fantasy—“the big glitch,” as I calls it. R presses I for answers about the provenance of the book and I responds cautiously; first by prevaricating (“You’re talking about the interview, too?”) and then by rebuffing her (“Then I’m not sure I have the capacity to answer you”). R presses ahead and I implies that they might not be real (“if I were here when you began this novel . . .”). R accepts this and then insists that their dalliance with impossibility remains in the text. For R, “historical accuracy”—which is to say, an accurate depiction of the moments in her novel when the unreal supersedes the traditional rules of reality in her book—trumps any other consideration, including the possibility that someone might read this and other sections of her book and place it aside because it does not conform with their idea of how literary fiction should work.
R’s insistence on keeping the “glitch” is not simply a formal decision—it’s a refusal to conform to a literary standard that would exclude her lived experience. For writers like Gladman, narrative rupture is not indulgent or avant-garde for its own sake; it reflects the irregular shape of a life lived at the intersection of race, gender, and queerness. The refusal of coherence becomes a strategy for liberation; a way to make space in literature for lives that defy tidy arcs.
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As I was reading this book, I could not stop thinking about another art form, one that perhaps seems entirely different from literature, but is quite similar to My Lesbian Novel in certain crucial, admirable ways: professional wrestling. While Gladman’s novel has entirely different aims than professional wrestling (indeed, one could even argue that wrestling and My Lesbian Novel have conflicting aims, since professional wrestling does not have an admirable track record with respect to its treatment of women) they share storytelling strategies—they are both thrillingly and audaciously authentic.
Since 1989, when wrestling impresario Vince McMahon (then owner of the World Wrestling Federation, the most popular wrestling promotion in America) admitted that professional wrestling is staged in order to avoid oversight from state athletic commissions, wrestling has resided in a generative liminal region between sports and entertainment, between reality and fiction. I say “generative” because wrestling promotions have been forced to execute storylines that are absorbing enough to attract interest from consumers who know that the resolution of each match has been preordained. As a result, wrestling promoters often stage elaborate fictions that often incorporate “real” information about the wrestlers involved, including details from their personal lives and backgrounds.
Professional wrestlers deliver these storylines over the course of many weeks, and sometimes longer, yet because they perform before live crowds the audience is able to exert significant influence on the course and longevity of these storylines. In some cases, the audience (both in person and online) can force wrestling companies to elevate certain storylines, devalue them, or jettison them altogether. The audience at a wrestling show is not merely a receiver of amusements, like an audience at a concert or play; wrestlers often react in real time to the desires of an audience. In the following shows, the wrestlers might unveil revisions to their storylines, not unlike R delivering italicized modifications to her novel in response to the queries and statements of her interlocutor. I am especially intrigued by this ongoing exchange between the wrestler-performers and the audience, which in many ways echoes the relationship between R and her conversation partner in My Lesbian Novel.
In both cases, the authors—R and the wrestlers/wrestling companies—present an alternate vision of storytelling, not as a static collection of words that is passed from one person to another, but as an iterative, instantly evolving art form that can and must respond to the desires and interrogations of human beings. Conversation is undoubtedly the medium of our moment because of social media and the rapid proliferation of podcasts, among other developments. Conversations have become so important because they help us process information that would otherwise remain esoteric—it’s often much easier to work through a difficult problem with someone else than to do so by yourself—and because they’re based on parity. In the best conversations, no one party is superior to another; instead, all parties wander toward meaning and resolution together. Both wrestling and My Lesbian Novel (Gladman’s novel and the novel within it) demonstrate how supple and persuasive storytelling can be when it is built upon the chassis of conversation.
In addition, by offering us an analogue of our world, Gladman and professional wrestling organizations are also showing us how we can alter and upend our own reality. Both share the tactic of creating simulacra of reality and then demonstrating how they can be manipulated and even erased. Wrestling audiences, for example, have been trained over many years on a storytelling template that accurately describes the world beyond the wrestling ring: in many companies, including and especially World Wrestling Entertainment (formerly World Wrestling Federation), a few powerful figures wield considerable influence over everyone else, and determine how their lives will unfold. Yet their power is constrained—just like R’s storytelling power is constrained in My Lesbian Novel—by their conversation partner, in this case, the audience. If the crowd is vociferous enough, the all-powerful executive must change course. In other words, the audience, just like the interlocutor in Gladman’s novel, co-creates the narrative. This approach is a subtle but extremely potent shift in perspective, because it provides an invitation to reexamine how the world beyond the pages of a book or outside a stadium is structured as well. It’s an invitation to consider that we are all citizens of a story, a story that was written by other people, a story that was created to elevate a select few at the expense of everyone else.
In short, we exist within a work of fiction. What would happen if we insisted on wresting the power to create narrative away from the powerful; what if we informed them that we intend to engage in conversation, as opposed to merely listening to the stories they dictate to us?
Shortly before reading My Lesbian Novel, I saw another movie that threatened to sever my connection to literature altogether. It is called My First Film. This film, directed and cowritten by Zia Anger, is about her first failed attempt to make a movie, and how she was devastated and altered by that failure. The film also stands as a triumphant postscript to that story; here we are, watching a film by Zia Anger that has been successfully completed and distributed to audiences. The film was also the final (as of now) version of a project that Anger has been developing for much of her artistic life: her initial failed film, then a Zoom presentation about that film that she screened during the pandemic, and then her feature debut, which itself is an iteration and continuation of the presentation. This movie was vibrating with authenticity—it was the opposite of a perfect, final product—and I was thrilled to engage with each iteration of its evolution. It was after watching this film that I finally had a concrete understanding of what I needed from literature, and when I read Gladman’s book I was genuinely elated because I had so quickly discovered a book that delivered what I had been looking for. I had reached a point where I believed literature could no longer astonish me. I was wrong.
My Lesbian Novel enabled me to embrace a more fluid, dynamic understanding of what literature can be. This is what the best art—whether in the form of a novel, a film, or a wrestling match—does best: invites us into an illusion, only to reveal, in time, that we are more than mere spectators. We were participants all along.
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My Lesbian Novel. By Renee Gladman. St. Louis: Dorothy, a Publishing Project, 2024. Distributed by New York Review Books. 152 pp. $16.95.
