Dykette: A Novel

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also while typing “jenny’s high femme camp antics” i couldn’t help but think of the l word’s jenny schecter

Then, on this book’s Message…. i don’t know…. butch femme dynamics just don’t really factor into my personal life. If that’s your bag that’s great, and i don’t begrudge you your subjectivity & preferences. But I don’t get how any of this is meant to look appealing. While I can’t deign to speak to the universal dyke experience either, I do think had the protagonist had tried to understand or relate any other kind of lesbian relationship dynamics, this book would have had a more realistic view on 21st century lesbianism. no one’s individual neuroses Say Something about Lesbinianism. but also, as a femme in style only, maybe I just didn’t get it. I’m not saying every gay book has to Say Something. But this book is purporting to, and that’s what’s often enraging (especially through the first 3/4 before shit gets moving plot-wise). To yield: to give way to pressure, to crumble, to surrender. This is a special mode of being and a special mode of writing. It got at a concern I’d long considered in my writing: How can the frivolous, or playful, be made serious—but without straightening up? The nude woman’s expression captures something both tough and gentle, as does the cardinal’s blank one, his beak angled down accommodatingly. Jenny Fran Davis: It never occurred to me to write a book about gay people where they’d suffer—why would I? And it’s not that my life or my friends’ lives have been devoid of suffering. But it’s much more funny than it is sad to be gay. We are hilarious. We’re always laughing and having fun—whether we’re laughing at or with each other. There’s a moment in Dykette when Jules’s parents call on New Year’s Day and brag about how much fun they’re having on their holiday cruise, and Jules hangs up the phone and is ranting and raving to the group and says, with bloodshot eyes, clearly traumatized from the week: “We had so much fun! They can’t even imagine how much fun we had!” A humorless butch is 10 times funnier than a straight man. It just seems like the ratio is all wrong in these tragic tales. I think the book is a rejection of the humorless, moralizing, holier than thou tone in literature that I see so much of. A friend of mine said that Dykette is a love letter to our community, but it’s also a gentle spank. I think that was kind of the perfect way to put it. It’s humor and callousness and frivolity are kind of spanking our culture to say: It’s okay to have fun and be beautiful and sexy and not be so serious and suffering and weighty. I’m materialistic, which is maybe why people clutching their household objects drew me so magnetically. The images came to me, unbidden, in my mind’s eye. My material world floated around me in what the Germans call kopfkino, or inner cinema: I saw people clutching food and animals and objects, all of them holding on tight.

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In a lot of ways, irony and persona are the primary modes by which she interacts with people. We see her game outplay her by the end. There's nothing left to perform, but there's also nothing more sincere than performing for her. For whatever reason, it's how she engages with the world. And like any way of interacting with the world, there will come a point that the world just becomes completely disorienting and illegible to you. Jesse was in the bedroom next door to the bathroom, on the phone with Faye the psychotherapist. Though it was their first afternoon in Hudson, and technically they were on vacation, Jesse had forgotten to cancel before Faye’s forty-eight-hour cancellation window, so she’d excused herself from the rest of the group for the fifty-minute phone session to avoid paying Faye’s cancellation fee. Sasha’s phone read 3:23, meaning that half an hour of Jesse’s therapeutic hour remained. If you’re in the mood for a sexy novel that explores the messiness of queer relationships, Dykette should be on your list.” Even the lane that is Dykette's birthright, that of Maggie Nelson and Michelle Tea-esque queer or queered femme writing, isn't improved by this addition to the genre. I couldn't decide between going for my MFA or my PhD in literature. Having the protagonist be in a PhD program was a way for me to cosplay as a PhD student, see what it would be like to merge academic theory and scholarly texts with campy, fun, gossipy novel writing. I'm still dreaming about getting a chance to go into a super academic program and shut myself away for, like, five years and read all of the theory and historical documents and get into the archives, all of those things I’ve always been really obsessed with.

Seen by butch. Seen as femme. Maybe a better word for it was dykette. Containing both the butch's gaze, and the femme's stare. Because of course, they're looking at each other" Anyway, this book is unapologetically lesbian, and I'm here for it. Sasha is inherently unlikeable as a narrator, and that's fine. What's important here, for me, because I'm sure the queer community is already familiar, is learning so many terms and nuances that go on between relationships. And that's not to say these relationships are indicative of a whole. But they're certainly not cookie-cutter. This is what I like about expanding my reading. You learn something new every day, if you let yourself. That’s what being a dykette means to Sasha: to be realized, made whole, by a butch’s gaze. “Seen by butch. Seen as femme,” Davis writes. “Maybe a better word for it was dykette. Containing both the butch’s gaze, and the femme’s stare. Because of course, they’re looking at each other.” Sasha romanticizes traditional marriage and suspects it may be the best way to secure Jesse’s undivided attention for good. She exalts domesticity, even fetishizes it, trying to out-housewife other femmes with her cooking and misguidedly thrifting a fur-trimmed wedding dress during a group shopping trip. But the fantasy of the traditional nuclear family ultimately fails to fulfill Sasha’s most desperate desires to be seen and therefore known and loved. A] biting tale of two young queer couples who go upstate with an older lesbian couple...plenty to cringe and laugh at.” Dykette takes on desire, debauchery, and destruction through a distinctly queer—and propulsively entertaining—lens.”She was, in some sense, yielding, though she was also incensed and hysterical, and to those things she was yielding, too, disintegrating herself into her performance of anger. With all that said, ultimately I could not tell if this was a book that is trying to skewer the performance of aesthetics or if it is trying to celebrate them. I did not like any of these characters, which is fine. But Sasha and her constant need to be admired, to be petted and coddled, is exhausting. It is hard to say whether Darcy, Sasha's rival, is actually more genuine or if she is putting it all on as much as Sasha is, much to Sasha's chagrin. It is rather fascinating to see the two of them try to one up each other (and occasionally, when she puts in the effort, both get showed up by Miranda) but then you wonder what is it all for? someone else pointed out that it’s like anti-diminutive (as -ette usually is) but instead maximalist, exponentially femme, super accessorized There’s the question of, is the book serious? Are the characters serious? Does Sasha really think “faking it” is easy and fun? Is she just trying to be funny? Is she “faking it”? Am I serious as the writer of the book? Then there’s the bigger question of: Is it a serious work of literature? Is it a serious work of fiction? What I hope is that the book is taken seriously, or semi seriously, in its celebration of joy and humor and gossip. I hope its anti-seriousness is taken a little bit seriously. Or maybe instead of taken seriously, it can have an impact: change something in the reader or mean something to someone. I think those feel like better alternatives to the question of: Is it serious or unserious? I hope it’s impactful. Over text, Davis and I discussed Dykette and ribbons and Lana Del Rey in between going to the tailor (Jenny) and taking a shower (me).

I think that is a really great summary of every conceivable dynamic in this house. There's certainly sexual attraction, but beyond that there's infatuation, jealousy, and this sort of classic queer thing: do I want to be this person, or do I want to be with this person? There’s a desire for recognition, but there's also just desire, and I think that those things can get really confusing, especially in context of intergenerational friendship. What might I grow into? What did I used to be? Lou seems the most comfortable with themselves, and Jules is the most pretentious, like she always has to try too hard. I’m not a particularly visual person. I don’t notice birds or butterflies in the sky, and I don’t care about the shape of the moon. I have to really like the colors of a painting to spend more than a few moments with it. But the Wilde renderings hit me, though many of them are drawn in muted tones. in a nutshell, the focus of this book is on creating Dykette as a category— a sort of new high femme // femme-in-relation-to-butch // femme-as-seen-by-butch. Dykettes, judging from this book, are performative, over the top, insecure, protective, coquettish, concerned with beauty & aesthetics. they see other femmes as competition and butches as potential sexual / romantic partnership. butches are there to provide horniness / sexual interest, while the femmes receive. the sex scenes representing this idea were hot. I also didn’t mind the referencing of external texts in true Iowa MFA form—if you liked this aspect of In the Dream House or Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl, this might interest you.That's such a good question, and definitely something I thought a ton about. Objects feel so central to the ways that we think about ourselves and other people, and in that way they actually don't seem inanimate at all. They seem very full of life, meaning, and personality. I think that the materialism of the characters at first glance might seem shallow or superficial, but objects carry a ton of meaning and association for the characters. They're often a really good shorthand for emotion. It's almost like not looking directly at the way a character is feeling but imbuing an object with the rage or jealousy or infatuation that a character might be feeling.

Straight people are going to be downright confused by a lot of this book and queer people are probably going to fight about it. This is, truly, a victory and perhaps the most important accomplishment for a queer novel these days. The market really wants a more friendly, watered-down queerness instead of the mess it really is, so I am delighted this novel was published. and i had fun slightly fictionalizing the real-life response to the essay and getting to do a bit of reparative work there hahaha well it’s so funny you started with ribbons because my definition of dykette is literally “dyke with frills, bows, and ruffles” Another thing I was really interested in was the extent to which other people will always be opaque to us, like maybe we can clear away certain things and maybe people come out in their full, naked desires, but how even the expression of those things can feel really superficial. I guess a big dynamic is exploring how can people be at once absolutely performative and absolutely sincere at the same time? As the late December afternoons blur together in a haze of debaucherous homecooked feasts and sweaty sauna confessions, so too do the guests’ secret and shifting motivations. When Jesse and Darcy collaborate an ill-fated livestream performance, a complex web of infatuation and jealousy emerges, sending Sasha down a spiral of destructive rage that threatens each couple’s future.The attention to language in this book is really sharp, whether with humor or the sense of language being fleeting. Visibility is called “a word that everyone loved then.” What are you thinking about with language in the discourse?