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Bogeywoman

Jaimy Gordon

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A Sun & Moon title.

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In her third work of fiction, Jaimy Gordon takes on the difficult subject of a young girl who, coming of age and “coming out” sexually, falls in love with an older woman and, through the process of their relationship, is cured. We first witness Gordon’s young heroine in a girl’s camp, where she escapes the boundaries of the camp and the boundaries of propriety as she is found to have, in self-hatred, carved messages in her arms. In the psychiatric ward of a hospital, the Bogeywoman—as she comes to be called—joins the other misfits in creating a musical group and in general mischief-making, including the heist of a nitrogen oxide machine and the accidental burning of her beloved and anorexic friend. Locked away, she comes in contact with the strange and exotic psychiatrist Madame Zuk, and it is love at first sight. Gradually, the two develop a friendship that explodes into a love affair, resulting, in turn, in a marvelous voyage of self-discovery that will remind one of Dickens’ Oliver Twist mixed with Nabokov’s Lolita. Author of the now legendary fiction Shamp of the City-Solo and the highly praised novel She Drove Without Stopping, Gordon writes a work that is hers alone—a gritty, funny, surreal exploration of coming out / coming of age, and one of the best lesbian novels since Barnes’s Nightwood.

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“Jaimy Gordon’s Bogeywoman is everywhere radiant with energy and verve. The novel, at once funny, iconoclastic, and bittersweet, offers us a prose so lavish and daring that it achieves nothing less than a radicalization of language. This is an extraordinary book.”

— Gilbert Sorrentino