music, books, love and kindness

"I'd loved the book so much I had a crush on it. For two weeks after I turned the last page the book lay on the floor next to my bed and whenever I looked at it I felt actual pain, so great was my sadness that the story was over."--from the novel Zippermouth

Zippermouth by Laurie Weeks is a lovely mess of a book. It's not particularly plot-driven and definitely not linear, but it's written in such an earnest, endearing and very funny way that it's very hard not go crazy over it.

I mostly love the book because of the writing (like the quote above) but if there is a plot, it goes like this (taken from Publisher's Weekly because it sums it up better than I can): 

"Weeks’s brash, exuberant debut traces a young lesbian woman’s tortured, drug-addled, unrequited crush while living in New York City in edgier times. The narrator is wracked by anxieties and is at home in the toxic landscape of 1980s lower Manhattan; drugs and alcohol both calm and stimulate her, lending the prose a psychotic compression that recalls Naked Lunch and imparts a fresh, lyrical sympathy to Week’s narrator. Dreamy, impressionistic, and rapturous, this brief volume is an ecstatic love story. (Oct.)"

It's such a short read and the plot jumps around a lot, but the writing is just wonderful, plus it's hilarious, choke-on-your-water hilarious at times! But as funny as it can be, there are some chillingly familiar (as in "I've been there!") passages almost too painful to bear: "Rejection always wiped me out so thoroughly that I disappeared, leaving but a wrinkle in the air, it was too hard to reassemble myself."

I don't want it to end because the writer speaks to me in a way a writer hasn't in quite some time!

This is the first novel I can ever recall reading where the narrator has a crush on Vivien Leigh and writes letters to Judy Davis (both of which make for some of the most comedic moments in the story).

Though Zippermouth may be hitting too close to home for me (minus the drug problems!) and is all-too-familiar to anyone who has ever felt different and isolated for being gay, there is a universality to the pain of unrequited love here that any reader can relate to..Laurie Weeks is a gifted writer, whom I hope has many more tricks up her sleeve.