alexandriaslibrary's reviews
248 reviews

who doesn’t love some messy lesbian clowning around!

Before reading Trio, I already knew that this book/subsequent play was so controversial because of its “lesbian themes” that it ended Baker’s career for decades. And that lens is, for better or worse, tinting my entire experience of the book!

Trio, in three “acts”, follows the love triangle between an esteemed female college professor, her TA, and a cater-waiter who ruins their life in the 1940s. Janet Logan is an ennui-laden ingenue who shuffles around with stacks of term papers and is at the beck and call of her professor (who she lives with) (and is obviously her lover). But in the first act—an academic party scene—she meets Ray, poor, yet charming and observant, and they immediately connect. Her professor, femme and very mommy, bosses Janet around too much and Ray thinks Janet should just quit her career and marry him. 

The two things that are hooking me. One, the novel is structurally a play…. which is one of my favorite craft techniques. I LOVE a tight focus, and Baker is doing is masterfully. The settings are so clear and lived in, and the characters really move within them. There is a lot of dialogue, so the pacing and timing is very even, and the dialogue is good! Quippy, philosophical, biting. Also the three scenes are wonderfully picked, from the lavishness of the party to a penniless love nest. 

Second, it is so fascinating to see the limits of homosexuality in a “big” published book from the 1940s. This book wasn’t “pulp,” but literary fiction, but Baker of course had to uphold certain tropes to be published. But when reading it you can see through it almost, the erasures of their relationship (which is made explicit in the book when Janet tells Ray she’s basically too damaged to marry him because Pauline has ruined her and he responds by sobbing facedown on his couch). But when Pauline is talking to Janet, there IS a very real depiction of queer love. Pauline has forged a house for them, a life, she’s sacrificed and enmeshed their careers (but blah blah Pauline is also an evil lesbian.) And Baker was a queer woman with a very similar background to our female characters (French academia) 

Anyway, this book is tragically out of print and used copies are few and far between. It certainly doesn’t hold up to modern ideas of a “lesbian” book, but placing it back in its context made for a very compelling read 

“What would it be like to know this woman, to put a hand out and touch her, and hear her talking to you, to have her give you the key to the medicine chest and tell you to be asleep when she got home? What would it be like to see her at night, and then in the morning, and meet her somewhere and have lunch with her? What would she say when she gave you a brown orchid, or would she write it?”

Could not read a juicier memoir! Mr White has had thousands of gay sexual partners since the 1950s, and he spares little detail. Jumping between his adolescence, school years, and the almost dreamlike  Post-Stonewall and Pre-AIDs decade, he recounts the many “loves of his life.” 

“When I speak of the great love of my life, I don't mean the degree to which someone loved me. I mean how madly, desperately I was in love. Once when I was sobbing in public over my broken heart over some man or another, Joyce Carol Oates, friend and colleague at Princeton, asked me coolly how many men had I rejected and hurt? Of course in my egotism I hadn't kept track of that, though they must have been in the dozens. For me love was always passionate and one-sided, aspirational and impossible, never domestic and mutual. Did I need that distance, that anguish, to contemplate the beloved and write about him?”

When I reach for a backlist title (especially from the 80s and 90s) it’s with a hope to find a book like this. Tonally resonate and structurally unique. It’s so free from our modern “MFA novels” and really makes you think about craft and what a “book” can be.

Asa is Dinah’s married boss who she starts a situationship with (for months they only kiss, tender and sloppily) And Dinah is open with these facts and their moral quandary. She proposes this: that she wants to discern why Asa is so distant. The middle of the book is her imagined, third-person narrative of Asa’s youth and his friendship with a beautiful boy named Reuben. 

Someone reprint this asap!!

An intro/analysis and a long reprinted poem from Stein. Lifting Belly is an ode to lesbian sex & Alice B. Toklas (Stein’s partner of 40 years) Kinda felt like overhearing to your neighbors that are in love or peeking through a peephole. Parts are so earnest, bare, and intimate. 

“Kiss my lips. She did.

Kiss my lips again she did.

Kiss my lips over and over and over again she did.

I have feathers.

Gentle fishes.

Do you think about apricots. We find them very beautiful. It is not alone their color it is their seeds that charm us. We find it a change.”

:-(( What a beautiful book about friendship, grief, and identity set against the college years 

Been really loving audiobook memoirs recently, this one was a great addition. Lieu's mother, a nail salon owner who fled Vietnam, died from complications of a tummy tuck when the author was 11. The author struggled with her grief through school, a wellness cult, and her own relationships with her family who refused to talk or discuss their mother.

As someone who has also lost a mother before many milestones, it was really moving to hear about how Lieu found acceptance and peace to keep moving forward. I also thought the audiobook was really great to actually hear vietnamese (a motif of the book is that the meaning of 'ma' can change drastically with different inflections including mother, tomb, and ghost.)

The author is also an actor/performance artist so the entire memoir feels very lived in and dynamic. 

Not even exaggerating—if you are gay you need to read this book….. this could be the best gay book I’ve ever read. Originally written in 1913/1914 but only published posthumously, this is a touching, beautifully crafted bildungsroman about a gay boy named Maurice Hall and his love triangle (and the horrors of attraction, intimacy, criminalized homosexuality, and class) <333

interconnected stories about black girls, women, and others (nonbinary) in britain. Loved the vastness and scope of their stories & that they felt very three-dimensional and real 

Should be required reading! What a mind, her views are still “radical” 40 years later but I wish everyone would’ve listened then

“Can any one of us here still afford to believe that efforts to reclaim the future can be private or individual? Can anyone here still afford to believe that the pursuit of liberation can be the sole and particular province of any one particular race, or sex, or age, or religion, or sexuality, or class?

Revolution is not a one-time event. It is becoming always vigilant for the smallest opportunity to make a genuine change in established, outgrown responses; for instance, it is learning to address each other's difference with respect.”
From “Learning from the 1960s”