“It is so unlike me to admit these things, but I can’t stop myself,” the author says.
She describes her favorite lesbian romance tropes to an interviewer: women who carry their wounded lover in protector/rescue narratives and shifter protagonists, like wolves and dragons. She especially loves wolves, who “growl even in their human form when they sense arousal from their mate.” The author plunged into a queer romance deep-dive for research while writing her novel, so the interviewer asks about her work-in-progress. The author divulges steamy passages from her book, unfolding as they speak. The interviewer asks, “You’re writing the novel as we talk?” The author responds, “We talk then I write.”
But you forgot: the author is not Renee Gladman. There is no interviewer, nor any other romance forthcoming from The Dorothy Project. Gladman’s My Lesbian Novel (The Dorothy Project, 2024) is the interview you are reading, and the author and interviewer are its characters.
Metafiction by way of lesbianism, Gladman’s novel is a sexy shapeshifter of a book, an overheard conversation between two thinkers grappling with queer intimacy, as its author invents its deeply romantic tale. R, Gladman’s author-avatar, and I, her interviewer, discuss a queer romance novel centered around June, whose memory begins failing after a mysterious British woman transforms her world. Summoning Italo Calvino and Jordy Rosenberg, My Lesbian Novel is a genre-bending celebration of lesbian desire that offers an innovative shape for queer romance, a craft lecture spooning its own novel. Gladman shows that true romance emerges through dialogue, shaped between partners, no matter if they are lovers or writers wrestling with love.
R begins writing the novel inside the novel “by trying to see who’s there.” June arrives on the page, a “straight-up girl” fond of blond leather boots and meeting friends for lunch. She bears an unsettling problem of memory—which R might share but resists admitting to I. June explains her dilemma through shiitake mushrooms: “Most of my past acts like it’s covered with fungus, growths that distort details, that change the shape of the emotions belonging to certain events.” She also has a boyfriend. Not a partner or husband: a boyfriend. R, a queer woman, ventriloquizes June, baffled by her compulsory heterosexuality: “I can tell Ellis wants to have sex tonight. This is good. He’s having miso. I’ll take his penis in my mouth. It’ll have a nice flavor. We eat so good.” I remarks, “Okay. Wow.” R defends, “I’m new at this.” Once the British woman materializes, June orgasms each morning, for no reason she can discern. Her mushrooms go mad, hyperactive. Her friend Esther says, “Love, I just don’t think you want the stick anymore.”
When June meets the British woman on a flat rock over the Hudson, “specks of paint on her knees,” their forgotten first meeting consumes her, “(for example when I’m re-reading our text thread or just thinking her name, wondering why she’s here): they swell up as if after a heavy rain and they multiply.” The British woman tells her, “I’m not sure I’ve ever started a friendship with someone whom I’ve met before but who doesn’t remember me.” Yearning stretches taut across their developing tenderness. It’s all very intense and very, very queer.
Gladman gifts the reader with the interviewer, who hurls comical exasperation against the author. When R hesitates to commit to plot points, I balks. June cannot remember the British woman’s name, so the woman must type it into June’s cellphone. A pivotal moment. Gladman dangles her name, allowing narrative tension to escalate like sexual tension—though is there any difference? I is dying to know. The reader is dying to know. We peer over R’s shoulder as she writes. We want and want and want. R responds, “Umm. . . .” “Can’t you name her anything!?” I pleads, “I mean, what is going on here?”
Gladman works as both visual artist and a writer, one medium supporting the other. In a series titled, “Moons and the Planetary,” she layers white circles on black background. They interface, hollow and solid against painstaking swirls of writing. When June attends an art show, she focuses on a Gladman-like painting of burning circles that proves “more complicated up close . . . there are many multi-directional curving lines moving with the general outlook of the circle.” June calls herself a woman who “wakes up in a field of fragments. Half saying everything I’m thinking,” but this could equally be said of Gladman’s work, which leans into bridges and detours. In one moment, R analyzes the rhetorical expectations of a New York running back on ESPN, and in the next, she writes June destroying her “face with friction and wetness and whatever else,” much to the interviewer’s shock.
Gladman’s characters enter into a conversation about her writing, but her work also orbits itself across decades. In a simultaneous double release, The Dorothy Project is publishing My Lesbian Novel alongside her hybrid TOAF, originally released by Ateolos in 2008. (Dorothy co-founder Danielle Dutton says the press itself was created to publish Gladman’s series of Ravickian novels.) TOAF is a eulogy to her unpublished novella, After That, which “would never be a book in the world.” After That became To After That, Gladman’s tribute to the lost manuscript. She writes about drafting After That in the late ’90s, walking a concrete city and absorbing the “rough surfaces that leave patterns on you,” while invoking the grace of Antonioni’s Red Desert. TOAF is a slim little volume, but its pages swallow the world whole. If My Lesbian Novel is a book about a book coming into being, TOAF is a book about a book that never came to be. Gladman’s books confront endings like lunar cycles, rebirth inherent on their face.
By the time Gladman writes My Lesbian Novel, she foregrounds the need for a happy ending. R articulates the horror of living through the Trump presidency. She seeks safety in lesbian literary romances but finds novels that punish its heroine for her desire, either by death or worse: a permanent heterosexual partnership. “So, I was like I’m going to write my own fucking lesbian romance, and when you’ve finished reading it these women were going to be together and happy and sexy!” (R eventually stumbles upon the queer Happily Ever After genre, which addresses this problem, and happily ever after for her, gifts her with shifters and lover-lifters.) She constructs a queer pocket universe, refusing to recreate the terrors of the external world: “I’d found, most likely due to the crisis we were living, that I needed any characters I encountered—by either reading them or writing them—to be in a safe place, at home and nourished, when I was no longer with them.” But Gladman delivers a lesson in happiness that started decades before with TOAF, and it all spirals around queer failure.
Jack Halberstam writes, “Failure is something queers do and have always done exceptionally well.” In TOAF, Gladman writes, “At some point, it occurred to me that though I could not have the book I could have the story of its failure and perhaps this would be enough.” During After That’s revision, Gladman faces sheer confusion and extreme sadness. Rather than run from these experiences, she leans toward emotion, allowing herself to become as saturated as June’s mushrooms later on: “I have run to a nearby park, thrown myself on a bench, and fallen over with my head in my lap, my hands scraping the ground, with the smallest of smiles on my face. Confusion is a gift, I have always thought.” Gladman’s writing trusts in the messiness of digression. Her writing is a Halberstamian dream, reveling in “the detours, twists and turns through knowing and confusion . . . that seeks not to explain but to involve.”
In a 2019 interview in The Believer, Gladman names My Lesbian Novel as an immediate failure: “as soon as I started it, I messed it up. Instead of starting a story, I started an interview . . . I’ve already failed at writing my sort of normal, straightforward, intelligent romance novel, because I’ve immediately added this metafictional layer to it.” She incorporates more into writing than just writing: drawing, math, even “sitting in a kind of electrified stillness.” Her mushrooms bloom, out and out. Still the “normal” romance narrative demands a Freytag’s triangle. R says, “In this new novel, the path has to be more defined. I want someone to meet someone else.” Everyone deserves the happy ending of romance novels, not just heterosexual people. So Gladman creates a queer hybrid romance, gifting her characters pleasure and love, while also refusing to conform to a straight(forward) shape.
Then again, maybe Gladman is only honoring an in-joke of lesbian intensity.
In a TikTok, a woman glances at her partner. “Everything lesbian is just very intense all the time. I feel like when we first met, I would literally just stare at your face and cry. Like I’m not exaggerating, would I not, baby?” Her partner shrugs, “Yeah, but that’s just normal, baby.” The woman exclaims, “I don’t think that’s normal.” Her partner shrugs again, “’Cause we’re lesbians.”
When June’s boyfriend studies her, his confusion is slightly joyless, unlike Gladman’s confusion in TOAF. “‘You are drifting,’ he’s been saying. ‘I’m looking at you through binoculars.’ He’s unhappy with the growing landscape. His face asking, ‘Why are you changing?’” Queer partners don’t ask, “Why?” They ask, “How are you changing? Can I change along with you?” If his attention drifts with distance, lesbian partners cry in each other’s faces, cuddle closer, and call that Wednesday evening.
If fungal expansiveness is one axis of Gladman’s sensibility, the inverse is true. R spotlights genre tropes to a laughable degree, so even the body becomes absurd: “I should probably say something about lips and nipples.” I answers, “If you can do that without making me deeply uncomfortable, I’d appreciate it.” Both the TikTok couple and Gladman pinpoint a fearless attention to one another, whether that is a lover or an object of study. Gladman transforms romance by hyper-attuning to the genre like a partner, so that the tropes become ridiculous, exposing nipples and lips. But this is love: crying into your lover’s face until it becomes so ridiculous, that the event becomes absolutely precious.
Under Gladman’s gaze, love is patience. A long-drafted object. A conversation held over years. Her books make you want to talk with a friend about love, love someone well, or be loved better than you have ever been. Gladman’s writing on queer romance is an act of devotion to queerness itself, a hyper-saturated mushroom colony, rewriting itself again and again.
