Renee Gladman | To After That (TOAF) | NYRB | September 2024 | 80 Pages
“To write something completely unlike anything I had written before, I would have to alter my process.”
—Renee Gladman, TOAF
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In the early months of 2024 I immersed myself in Renee Gladman’s writing, reading the Ravicka series in its entirety, all three titles in quick succession, followed closely by Calamities and Morelia, two standalones. There is no reading experience akin to reading Gladman’s work. To read her is to have one’s mind opened to new possibilities for fiction—for what it can be, and for what it can achieve. For the questions that it can bring up, as well as those it has the potential to answer. It is to have the English language turned foreign before one’s very eyes, used in novel and thrilling ways to create worlds that you step into and occupy. It is to see language itself in a different light. It is to learn to dwell between the letters and words on the page, and to learn to be comfortable in that dwelling. It is to be willing to surrender control to her as a writer who continues to surprise at every turn over the course of her more than two decades long career. The more I read her, the closer I feel to understanding her literary project: how she views fiction, and the act of fiction writing.
Her most recent works, My Lesbian Novel and TOAF (To After That), a reissue of an original 2008 printing from Atelos, have both found a home at Dorothy, a Publishing Project. These books render her work and her literary project in an entirely new light, though the author continues to engage with and expand upon themes found in the works that came before them.
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I have always found Gladman’s work to be highly generative and thought provoking—these are small books of big ideas. As she herself writes in TOAF:
One can say “big and long” and be talking about a small book. Does everyone know this? I do not think so. No, I do not think it has reached the public that small books are just as compelling as fat ones.
And, as Dorothy co-founder and editor Danielle Dutton writes in the introduction to the reissue, “a slender work of prose, TOAF is big and long”. While Dutton does not say so outright, the same can be said for My Lesbian Novel, and for all of Gladman’s works. None of them reach even 200 pages in length, with most hovering closer to the 100 or 150 page mark, yet each is full to the brim with playfulness of language, with thought and idea. Gladman conjures whole worlds, performing verbal acrobatics while her narrators display the same curiosity and inquisitiveness that seemingly characterize the writer herself.
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It takes several weeks for the publication to accept my impassioned pitch to write about the new Gladman books. It is an exercise in patience. In order to do justice to the texts, I knew I could not write a straightforward review and would have to alter my process.
To quote from the pitch in question:
“My Lesbian Novel consists of three narratives, or books—there is the book the reader is reading, which is itself in the form of a conversation between a fictional interviewer “I” and a fictionalized form of Renee Gladman herself, in which Renee is documenting her attempt to write a lesbian romance novel of sorts. There is the book within a book, scenes from the romance novel itself, presented to the reader as italicized segments interrupting the interview portion (or perhaps the interview portion is interrupting the segments, as I don’t think one narrative is necessarily to be weighed above another). And there is the third book, referred to within the text as the “invisible book,” which is Gladman as the writer and author writing the book that we are reading within a space, incorporating all that she does when she is not writing.
TOAF (To After That) serves as a predecessor to this new hybrid form of the more recent work; it is a documentation of the failure to write a novella (After That) that exists only in this book chronicling its lack of coming to fruition. It’s a slippery text that includes swatches of this novella that doesn’t exist outside of its pages (to the reader, that is) and is again concerned with duration: the span of time it took for the original novella to be written, the span of time it took for the chronicle we read to be written, compounded by the now nearly two decades of temporal distance between its original publication and this reissue. Here writing is again presented as ongoing practice, one that is interrupted by and aided by all of the things we do when not writing—the time we spend with loved ones, the other art we are exposed to, etc.”
The Cleveland Review of Books publication contract refers to the piece as “the Essay,” so I began to refer to it as such internally, in the confines of my mind. I will continue to refer to it as “the Essay” here, in the text itself.
For the purpose of achieving some measure of clarity in the Essay, “R” will refer to the Renee contained within the pages of My Lesbian Novel, and “Gladman” to the writer Renee Gladman, author of My Lesbian Novel and TOAF. Here, “R” can be seen not as a perfect stand-in for Gladman, but rather as a stylized version of the author—essentially, a Gladman by way of Gladman. By inserting herself as a character of sorts in the text, Gladman curates a sense of intimacy between Renee and the reader, one that is furthered as the reader is afforded a firsthand glimpse into the writing process of the book in question through the course of its reading. As Renee tells the unnamed interviewer, “I want to be a kind of reader as I write. That means not knowing what’s up ahead” (My Lesbian Novel).
I wish to carry this same ethos into the writing of the Essay. I would like for things about the books to be revealed to me through the process of writing. Here perhaps you begin to see the daunting task of the Essay, in attempting to capture and analyze the layers of each of the two texts in question, while simultaneously serving as a process and way of inquiry for me, the writer. In addition to this general quandary, I am concerned with the following questions, namely:
How to do justice to these complex works? How can I dwell in the writing of the resultant Essay in the same way I dwell within the texts as a reader? What does it mean to read fiction that so blatantly lays bare the manner of its construction? How can I strip the critical essay to its bones and present them to the reader as Gladman has done to the novel in MLN? Particularly, how can I do this despite lacking formal training in the art of criticism, and being relatively new to the field myself? How can I strike the same balance Gladman achieves between playfulness and intellectual rigor without resorting to mimicry?
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By the time I turn toward working on the Essay, nearly two months have passed since my initial reading of the texts. MLN and TOAF have lingered at the periphery of my consciousness during this time, which was also spent lavishing in the throes of summer. The writing always begins with reading, and so I turn to do a second closer read, digitally annotating as I move through the books. Gladman’s prose is so striking, so stunning on a sentence level that most of these sentences end up underlined. I resort to randomly switching between different colors as I go throughout the text. Technically I begin the Essay while on a brief vacation, in my family home. But this is using “begin” generously, for I merely jotted down a quick two paragraphs, a word count of merely one-tenth or less of the piece’s final length, and called it sufficient as a starting point. For after all, I was already a tenth of the way finished, and, after all, I was on vacation in the sunny Bay Area.
I begin to spend my time participating in the crucial writerly activity of Not Writing, of merely living one’s life, with the idea that all of the various slices that make up that life are as crucial to the act of writing as the writing itself. There is a cheekily refreshing explanation of Not Writing in the Danielle Dutton story-essay/essay-story of the same name, which allowed me to name an act I’d been participating in all my life. (Rereading Dutton’s story becomes part of my own Not Writing).
During this time I make spinach pesto in my parents’ lavish kitchen. My father observes curiously from a distance, as he has recently tested positive for COVID-19. I ride the BART alone up north to visit others. In the East Bay, I share a hearty full bodied laugh about this with one of my oldest friends and her partner. In the Haight, I see my brother’s newly purchased apartment for the first time. I fly back home to Chicago and walk to pick the dog up from the sitter. I rewatch Almodóvar’s Parallel Mothers with a friend who is watching it for the first time and keep my spoilers to myself.
Until my fingers return to the keys once again, document open in front of me, the Gladman texts are hovering at the back of my mind: not to the degree of taking away from my attention and frequent enjoyment of the activities at hand, but rather that I am living my life, participating in Not Writing, alongside the texts, existing in parallel to them. I formulate sentences in my head in lieu of daydreaming, but nothing is committed to the page. My ongoing semi-conscious procrastination is in part striving to achieve a healthy work/writing-life balance, and part out of fear of not being able to do justice to my mental conception of the Essay. As Gladman writes in TOAF, I am moving through “all the time that does not write” the Essay.
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TOAF
Throughout TOAF, Gladman makes clear that a writing life is a life that contains writing and all of its other constituent and complementary moments of not writing. A peculiar work, TOAF is described beautifully by Danielle Dutton in its introduction as “a book about the life of a book, a
book about living with and through writing, both alone and in community.” To Dutton, it is a book that shows its reader that “to write means to live with and inside your writing over many years, years that are full of writing but also other kinds of living—and full of failure, too.” Writing, as Dutton and Gladman make clear, is an ongoing process, one that encompasses all that comes in between, before, and after the pen leaves the page or the fingers leave the keys. The minutiae of life informs the writing, and whether life is occurring in the gaps between writing or the writing is occurring in stolen pockets of life is left up to interpretation.
TOAF, much like MLN, lays the process of its own writing and creation bare. It’s fitting that TOAF be re-released at the same time as MLN is published, as the two share a similar shape. Gladman writes that she set out to write a book that “would concern [her] favorite subject—the problem of the person in time and space.” As she begins to write, she suffers from a distraction: “It seemed that the time elapsing inside the narrative I was writing did not match that which elapsed outside, in that place where I sat.” And similarly, the writing and Not Writing of this Essay saw me crossing the country from the Midwest to the West and back again, in a span of several weeks.
In a conversation published by The Believer in early 2019, Renee Gladman and Anna Moschovakis discuss real world and narrative time, in the context of Gladman’s Houses of Ravicka (Dorothy, 2017) and the at the time still in-the-works book that would become My Lesbian Novel, alongside Moschovakis’s recent book, Eleanor, or the Rejection of the Progress of Love (Coffee House Press, 2016), each of these works written over the course of multiple years, with breaks and distractions in between. Their conversation is foregrounded with the following breakdown of the various planes on which time operates in fiction:
Three interrelated dimensions of time in fiction:
Writing time, or the time in which the author writes the story
Written time, or the temporal space within the narrative
Reading time, or the time in which someone reads the work
In TOAF, though written a decade prior, Gladman had explicitly gestured to this same distinction between writing- and written-time, and the often jarring experience of the writer who often occupies both temporal spaces simultaneously during the writing process. Something needs to have been written to subsequently be read, and so the reader is always experiencing the text in arrears.
The “writing” timeline for TOAF is pointedly murky. Gladman writes that she “set out to write a book” in the summer of 1998, then immediately second guesses herself that it “might even have been 1999,” all within the first page. It’s over a quarter of the book later that she finds definitive proof in a subsequent diary that certainly the writing began in the summer of 1998 (she hadn’t been in the practice of keeping one when the writing work began). Fittingly, both the uncertainty and its ultimate certain conclusion remain a part of her account of writing the book, though Gladman acknowledges that the reader will wonder why the uncertainty will be left in, to which she claims that the relief she feels at having the issue resolved is “more attractive than the perfection.” There is an urgency to this writing, despite her conscious attempts to slow down.
TOAF is intercut with swathes of text from the unpublished novella in question, After That. Gladman is clear that “the pages [she] wrote were real”—here she speaks to a general truth about publication, which is that work that has been written but remains unpublished are no less valid and “real” than works that have been published and shared with readers. She includes the entirety of the fourth chapter as evidence of the “advent of the cell phone” which sparked “the true disfigurement of public space by the ever-proliferating “private conversation.” The evolution of technology, and the natural change in global conditions with time, directly impacts the writing time, as she soon realizes she has “written a book that was out of style before [she] had even finished it.” Gladman then provides an outline of the rest of this first draft—details such as location names, character names, the name of a film—the reader is invited to fill in the rest.
Five years after writing its initial pages, in the summer of 2003, Gladman finished the final draft of the novella. She underscores the labor of writing through mentioning the “two extensive rewritings and probably two (less intense) reworkings and countless line and paragraph edits” that shaped this final version. She is now living in a different city than the one in which she began writing the novella. The passing of time has also caused a shift in the spatial conditions of her writing life, a movement through space that parallels the reader’s path through a novel. Her body feels torn between her former and current cities; she feels as though she is “someone occupying two places at once.”
But before she was able to finalize the novella came yet another draft. The novella’s second draft is written within an adjacent city from that of the first draft following a move in Gladman’s personal life. There she “learned that it is possible to write a book based on your life in one place and continue it in another.” Regardless of “what you do in actual space,” writes Gladman, “you just go on writing.” The location of the writing shapes the writing itself but is also ultimately inconsequential to the act.
But geographic and spatial location does impact the writing, as she finds writing to occur at a particularly slower pace in the house on Filbert Street, the space that helped form the novella’s second draft. It is also in this house, and following the completion of the second draft, that the draft is left to its own devices for some time, while Gladman occupies herself with writing a different book, with the milestone of turning thirty, with eating tofu and having her photo taken. Physical locations, especially ones that we call home, can store memories in their walls, personal histories that we occupy when within their space.
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Work on the Essay bridges gaps in my personal history across space and time, from my childhood home to my current chosen home. When in my childhood home I occupy the role of ‘my parent’s child,’ a perfunctory pause of the self-sufficiency of my life in Chicago executed so that I am able to be taken care of and cared for by others once again.
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In writing the account that we are reading, years removed from the writing After That, a fog has descended upon Gladman’s memories regarding the past. She admits that she does “not always remember writing this book” (TOAF). Her recollection has been pieced together in part with the aid of her journals and letters from the time, a beautiful circular moment, where writings from the past aid in the writing of the present and future. Naturally, certain memories are sharper and stronger than others, better preserved over time due to their personal significance. For Gladman it is a particular line performance by Monica Vitti in Michelangelo Antonioni’s Red Desert (1964), in which Vitti proclaims “Everything I have done is my life.” It is this line that spurs the novella’s conception, though Gladman is again quick to admit her uncertainty as to whether it was actually 1997 when she saw the film.
Gladman shares a diary entry from this period. It reads:“the act of writing can take on a character role”. This is precisely how the act of writing functions in the text, not only as a character but as the main character and protagonist; what we are following are not the characters of the novella After That who were listed above, but rather the act of the novella’s writing. In another entry, she writes: “what I’m attempting to do is make the reader suspect this progression, suspect whether she is in fact progressing”. When a novel or novella or short story has a traditional narrative structure, one that is driven by plot, the reader’s purpose is clear: to progress through the text and learn what happens in the story. But when the work in question is devoid of plot per se, and the ending has already been spoiled—that the novella After That never sees the light of day—the reader’s purpose is troubled. The reader is thus brought to awareness of their typical movement through a text, only for it to be foiled through the very writing they are reading.
Two-thirds of the way into the text, the plot of the novella is revealed to the reader, in an abbreviated authorized version. Here, Gladman again provides a basic synopsis of the story, enough for a reader to grasp the gist of events. The events themselves are largely inconsequential in relation to the finished TOAF, since what is important is that these events were written at all. Gladman’s penchant for toying with genre conventions comes through here, particularly when she interjects to note that she “added this criminal element” of the insinuation of “‘dark’” doings” by the characters as she felt she needed to “beef up the mystery”. Full chapters from After That are included here, in yet another instance of the text adhering to rules it makes for itself: “how does one write the story of a novel–eulogize it—without incorporating it somehow?”
Earlier, Gladman clarified the distinction between the notion of the draft, and the notion of “finishing”—the former as progress, the latter as surrender. Years pass from the time that she has completed what became the final draft of After That, and the time when she unburies and reassesses it, surrendering that it is unfinished, unsalvageable, and not what she wanted it to be. Thus, it will never see publication and reach the eyes of the common reader.
After That is a “ghost book,” and yet TOAF lacks a sense of haunting because it indirectly gives form to the ghost which would have, in another story, haunted it. Instead, After That is given a new lease on life, through this report of its conception and writing that we are reading today which preserves its memory in its pages. Signifying the circular relationship to time that the work has embodied, TOAF fittingly ends with the exact same paragraph with which it begins, closing the circuit of its temporal existence, rendering it infinite.
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There is a quote from TOAF that I meant to use that evades me as I write; I scroll endlessly back and forth through the document, try various search-words in the “Find” function, and ultimately give up. Perhaps I am misremembering it, searching for something that isn’t there.
It is only weeks later, in full disclosure as I work on a second draft of the Essay, that it strikes me that the quote was hiding in plain sight, before my very eyes, amidst my underlines on the page. Gladman gestures toward keeping unorthodox hours at least twice in TOAF—when she notes that she “would wake and write this novel, and I would stay up late and write it,” and later when she takes a break in the narrative to tell the reader “It is the middle of the night.”
I find these mentions noteworthy as I have been keeping unconventional hours myself as of late. For months now I have been striving to reach “normal” levels of thyroid activity, and my current state of overactivity of the past few months results in nightly interrupted sleep. I am awake in the middle of the night for an indeterminate length of time, depending on a myriad of factors, including the busyness of the preceding day. During these stolen hours my habit has been to construct sentences in my head in lieu of counting sheep. Only those constructions that linger into the light of day are committed to the page.
MY LESBIAN NOVEL
My Lesbian Novel similarly spills the secrets of its creation throughout the body of its text, though it also signifies an evolution from TOAF in that, despite its glaring omissions, it succeeds across multiple levels, serving as an effective metatext while also offering a romance novel that, while a tad skeletal, feels rich and full of depth. That is, the lesbian novel excerpted in its pages is still enough to titillate and thrill, and its protagonist June, whose narration we receive alongside description of her story through the framing of the interview between “I” and Renee (“R”), feels more real and actualized than the characters of After That.
MLN is also a sort of ghost story. It is haunted by the grand mystery at its center, which is the circumstances of a significant encounter between June and a beguiling unknown woman, who she recalls having met before but cannot remember the specifics of their meeting. In this way it is also an unconventional detective story, and exhibits the same genre fluidity and blending that is seen in TOAF. Both reader and writer R are placed on parallel journeys of discovery as they progress through the work in order to ultimately uncover its secrets, similar to the journey undertaken by the reader in Houses of Ravicka, Gladman’s novel from 2017, whose protagonist struggles to locate a particular house in the city-state in order to geospatially map it, but is thwarted on their quest by Gladman herself, as author, not knowing where the house might be, and having to discover it through setting the text aside.
As mentioned above, MLN exists as three distinct books: there is the book that we are reading, the book within a book (June’s story), and the “invisible book” of Gladman writing within a particular space and across time, incorporating all the life that she lived in between.
Starting with the reader’s experience, in the book that exists in the world titled My Lesbian Novel, “I” asks “R” about the book she wishes to write, and how she will start it. R expresses that it will contain elements of her past works—bodies across spaces and time, set in a city—but that she will also be “try[ing] to do something different with how it moves”, attempting to write a work with more plot than she has in the past, and struggling to do so. In the aforementioned conversation with Anna Moschovakis, Gladman describes almost immediately failing at her determined goal of writing a “normal, straightforward, intelligent romance novel” by “immediately add[ing] this metafictional layer to it.”
R alludes to the relationship she perceives between her writing and drawing practice, one that Gladman writes of extensively in Calamities, her book from 2016, published by Wave Books. Drawing serves as “language with its skin peeled back,” a different method through which to approach the practice and space of writing. My Lesbian Novel can be seen in this light as a novel with its skin peeled back, exposing the bones and muscle of its writing, equally concerned with the physical body and the writing form. This is similarly a slim book of big ideas, and Gladman is aware of the density that results. The interviewer asks R during her description of the interconnectedness of her drawing and writing if they “should pretend what [she’s] just said makes sense,” a cheeky moment of self awareness. The reader is entrusted with the ideas, and their ability to parse through them. This is a book that treats its reader as intelligent beings, which can unfortunately be a rarity in the contemporary literary world. It is one that openly acknowledges that the reader “brings her own everything to a book,” that a lot of the time we’re reading “for what we need.” As a result, it is said that “it never happens that the book they’re reading is precisely the one you wrote;” the reader is a willing participant in the book’s creation, often through assigning it significance and meaning.
Further foils to the writing process are set up by R herself. June is a “straight-up girl” which she is unused to writing. She is also, at least at the beginning of the book, a straight girl with a boyfriend named Ellis, whose “milieu is very heterosexual.” When the interviewer asks if June is African-American, R replies that she “can’t figure it out,” which has contributed to how long it has taken her to begin writing the novel. She is unused to having to describe a character for the reader’s benefit. June herself, as R describes, “doesn’t know she’s a novel,” and the book is limited to June’s viewpoint because otherwise there would be no details to uncover through R’s writing process. Throughout the text, June struggles with a fog and murkiness in her memory, what she refers to as her “mushrooms,” and the process of trying to extract those memories like “fungal growth.” Similarly in middle age, R is beginning to have lapses in her memory. Gladman, herself, exhibited the same as far back as TOAF.
Time plays a central role in MLN, as it does in TOAF. The interplay between memory and time is studied—as R is interested in the impact of the passage of time on memory and memory recovery, how details blend together and “surrounding memories” stain the memory one wishes to recover. Fiction in R’s view can be its own form of “memory palace,” a concept that is “more about architectures for thought”; fiction can serve as its own form of memory preservation, as it has in the living documents of both MLN and TOAF. And memory can be preserved through documentation—the journals that R pours through in writing MLN and attempting to determine when the writing began—as well as in the memories of another, as when R asks her partner Danielle if she would have begun a separate journal for the occasion.
“Writing time” is disclosed again for the reader’s benefit. R tells the interviewer that she had not written anything for the novel in months, having reached a block, until time passed and she discovered a way back into the text. As Gladman makes abundantly clear, writing is a process not just of documentation, but also one of discovery. “I” asks “R” if they should use this unique opportunity of the text’s being written through their conversation to offer the reader a glimpse into the time it takes for said work to be written; the reader is then informed that first a few months and subsequently five years have passed in the writing process. R has spent the past five years immersed in the canon of the lesbian romance novel, and is particularly interested in works that contain the Happily Ever After (HEA) that she desires for her own lesbian novel. Discovering the trove of existing HEA lesbian novels stumps her, and parsing through the tropes of non “experimental” lesbian novels frustrates and exhausts her, specifically the reliance on descriptive plot and language that is not treating as “a living force, as an inhabitable space, a space for encounter.” R’s position as a scholar of the lesbian romance genre allows her to offer critique as she acknowledges the “asshole” nature of calling these works often “poorly written.” It is seemingly through her deep love of the genre and her belief in its potential that she yearns for it to be better. The final pages of the book are devoted to the celebration of some of these titles that R came across in her research. She is drawn back into the folds of these novels because they demonstrate not only love between women but an understanding of “how beautiful women are,” and thus how beautiful a love between two women can be.
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June’s story, also contained within the pages of My Lesbian Novel, is a magnificent achievement in itself. The reader is drawn into June’s curiosity and frustration over her mushrooming memory, and the prose in the sections of the novel-within-novel is characterized by a warmth of tone and mood, imbued with feeling, and marked distinct from the interview portion prose that surrounds and frames it by its poetic nature. This second novel is provided to the reader in a fragmentary form. Again, it is up to the reader to fill in the blanks. At first, the narrative is interrupted due to R’s uncertainty and desire for discovery through writing; when the text cuts out, intrigue and suspense are built. When June’ glimpses and is approached by the British woman, first at an art show with her friend, the reader is naturally left to wonder at her identity and significance.
June knows that she has met the woman before, on a recent trip to London, but cannot recall the details of their encounter. Much like R, she turns to the written accounts of her life, stored in her journals and diaries, but finds that she has made no note of the incident, that she is in a way keeping it a secret from herself. She then turns to outside sources, bringing up her fungally blocked memories to her friends, and asking her friend Esther what she can recall of June and Ellis’s London trip. (June’s boyfriend Ellis is never actually present, only alluded to in absence, thus returning to the ghost story tropes. Any relation falling outside of the matrix of lesbian love is left to haunt the novel, existing only in mention). June recalls that she met someone of significance, and Esther confirms that she met a woman who is a line artist, but no further details are provided.
June has her second fleeting encounter with the line artist when constructing a model for her work in the architecture realm. June is not an architect herself, but rather a builder of models to aid architects in their work, and thus on an architectural team. When they meet for a third time in the narrative of the book, and a fourth time overall, it is at an exhibition of Gego sculptures. The reader is finally treated to a flirtatious exchange between the two, and June and the still-unnamed woman exchange numbers, causing June to smile “shyly, caught in the bashful early throes of a still unfamiliar form of loving another.”
Caught up in a flurry of work, with Ellis still away on business and her friends absent for reasons of their own, June receives what she describes as a coveted text from the woman, whose name is soon revealed to be Thena:
I’d be lying if I said she hasn’t been on my mind. She’s been everywhere. On all my surfaces.
Upon receiving the text, June is flooded with emotions, her heartbeat sent racing. Proximity to Thena causes her mushrooms to “swell up as if after a heavy rain…and [sic] multiply.”
This is the bread and butter of good romance fiction. The familiar scenes of flirtationship transformed into courtship, characters blushing and crushing, the reader smiling and kicking their feet in secondhand experienced joy. That Gladman is able to deliver these thrilling emotional moments even in the midst of her deeply heady metafictional journey is a wonder. Despite being offered snippets and glimmers I am invested in June and Thena’s story, and their HEA. When they meet up a second time and exchange banter, June experiences butterflies—I swoon, too.
Throughout this time June has been drifting further away from her absent partner Ellis. When the book picks up again in part II and dives right into June’s story, the breakup has happened off screen, and June is spending time with her friends, dwelling in her mushrooms. It is Esther that clarifies for June that she’s experiencing a queer awakening, in the bluntest of terms. “‘Love, I just don’t think you want the stick anymore. Not entirely sure you ever did.’” Esther has been slotted into a crucial role in the narrative, that of the character that knows more than the main character(s) and is able to help them reach a much needed revelation.
It is following this revelation that the novel begins speeding toward its ultimate conclusion. June texts Thena to meet up, and tells her that she is ready to hear about what happened in London. June knows few details and facts about Thena’s life, but she does know “what her patience feels like: a warm bath.” One can’t help but root for these two characters and their budding love. They have a proper conversation for the first time, in which Thena shares details of her upbringing and past before revealing the circumstances of their meeting in London. At this stage in the reading journey June and Thena’s racial backgrounds are revealed to the reader; each is described as being a “gorgeous brown woman” with “beautiful brown skin.” What follows is a smoldering, sensual scene—June wakes up entangled in Thena’s body on the couch, and the two consummate their relationship for the first time.
Much like the lesbian romance novelists whose work she has studied, among them Fiona Shaw, Naomi Alderman, and Sarah Waters, Gladman’s words reveal a deep seated love for women, and love between two women. As June notes, “I can’t say I’ve never found women beautiful because I have only done that.” Through her relationship with and desire for Thena, June’s own identity becomes clearer, for some aspects of character are only revealed through time, rather than provided in upfront description. It is notable that the two women are brown, as to love and desire the female form when you hold one yourself is to equally participate in an act of self-love. This is a celebration of love between women but also an erotics of Black and brown womanhood, of the beauty held in brown skin and darker nipples and softness and curves.
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Only one of these texts is explicitly called My Lesbian Novel, but both of these works, and in fact all of Gladman’s works, are by their very nature queer. Through her writing, Gladman enacts “queer” as a verb—queering the relationship between form and genre, troubling the notion of what makes a novel, working through questions of queerness and bodies and desire and space and language on the page. With these two process- and duration-driven works, Gladman has made it abundantly clear that at times as readers and critics we must have our relationship to the acts of reading and writing “queered” as well, to expand our definition of fiction and to begin to see it as an explorative space of discovery and innovation for both the reader and the writer, and that the life of a writer and a writer’s life outside of writing are inextricably intertwined.
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In writing the Essay, and attempting to capture the depth and rigor of Gladman’s craft, I too had to queer the form, but that of literary criticism rather than the novel. Gladman’s writing pushed me in my own writing, to practice vulnerability and insert myself into the text of the Essay in a manner not entirely natural to me, an exploration of form and its boundaries that will inform anything else I might write from this point on, a leaning-in to curiosity as I perform the roles of both reader and writer amongst the rhythms of my daily life.
Meghana Kandlur
Meghana Kandlur is a reader, freelance arts and culture writer, and bookseller based in Chicago, IL.