Eye-glazing esoterica notwithstanding, this dreamy, erotic “memoir” is a smart, sexy affair.
Tracy St. Cyr is a 40-something semifamous rock musician whose memoir focuses on two distinct periods, 1993 and 2019, excavating the trauma of relationships and transitions—first girlfriend to worst girlfriend, aspiring artist to legit indie star, passive adolescent to riotous trans girl.
Lead singer and guitarist of Static Saints, Tracy has divided her two personal epochs into Sides A and B, locating her firmly on a wry, lo-fi, then-and-now Gen X axis where reality can bite. Or as she says, “I felt like a hot aging punk dyke and realized that maybe I was a hot aging punk dyke.” Side A has an un-deadnamed Tracy chronicling first love and loss with Astrid while living in an unnamed city, alone until falling in with a dazzling coven of trans artists. In Side B she’s back in the same city, alone again and recovering from a devastating relationship with suicidal butch barkeep Johnny. And the transformations she once again finds here are restorative, generative, and very, very hot. As Tracy slips seamlessly into an eloquent and extremely explicit erogenous zone, Plante convincingly makes the case that there is in fact a difference between erotica and porn. The reader will also learn: how to eat an oyster, how to fist, how to muff. If only Plante had let Tracy keep exploring and explaining herself (on her “slutty” grad school years: “I drew the line at business and criminology students. I mean, we all need standards”). Instead, relentless inside-baseball musical references feel less like scene-setting and more like name-checking to establish music-geek bona fides. Mary Timony, Redd Kross, Langley Schools Music Project….Okaaay. Not least, it’s difficult to imagine many readers having enough particular knowledge or patience to stick with it. Similarly, Tracy’s protracted creative sessions can be pedantic at best, more likely just plain dull (“I put a capo on the second fret of my guitar and fumbled around with chords, finally locating a simple chord progression: Bm D A E”). And curiously, rather than just writing a first-person novel, Plante has inserted herself into the story as “co-author” of St. Cyr’s memoirs. She hits the conceit hard in a giddy foreword but abandons it entirely until a second foreword, this time from Tracy opening the 2019 section. The premise, which adds exactly nothing, is one darling that should have been killed.
Eye-glazing esoterica notwithstanding, this dreamy, erotic “memoir” is a smart, sexy affair.Pub Date: April 18, 2023
ISBN: 9781551529110
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Arsenal Pulp Press
Review Posted Online: March 27, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2023
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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