Thursday, April 07, 2005

Rent Girl

Michelle Tea, illustrated by Laurenn McCubbin
This is kind of an illustrated novel, not quite a graphic one. There are points where the pictures take on a portion of the storytelling, but for the most part, the burden is on the text (which is occasionally really poorly edited). The story is about a lesbian chick who gets into hooking because her crazy girlfriend is a hooker, and how that fucks up her whole life – or was she fucked up to begin with? It's all so crazy. And angry.

The narrator’s got a lot of anger and self-deprecation, and the story is fascinating and seedy and terrible and hard to look away from – I stayed up late finishing it, because I couldn’t stop reading. It’s got a very beat generation kind of feel in the straightforward, outraged kind of language, and it’s got that same kind of sad self-absorption and shabby patheticness that the Beats also seem to have.

The pictures are very pretty.

1 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Do you know when I read the girl got into 'hooking' I imagined latch-hook rug making and was trying to picture crazed lesbians sitting around making rugs. Then I realized you meant prostitution. HA!

4:04 PM  

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