My Lesbian Novel
Renee Gladman
The narrator of My Lesbian Novel is Renee Gladman, an artist and writer who has produced the same acclaimed body of experimental art and prose as real-life Renee Gladman, and who is now being interviewed by an unnamed interlocutor about a project in process, a seeming departure from her other works, a lesbian romance. Between reflections on art making and on the genre of lesbian romance—“though aspects of the formula drive me crazy . . . people who write these stories understand how beautiful women are”—a romance novel of her own takes shape on the page, written alongside the interview, which sometimes skips whole years between questions, so that time and aging become part of the process. The result is a beautifully orchestrated dialogue between reflection and desire, or clarity and confusion, between the pleasures of formula and the pleasures of freedom in the unspooling of sentences over time.
'My Lesbian Novel is a brilliant fusion of improvisational narrative and aesthetic treatise. It’s fiction and not. It’s also a hoot. And even (eventually) hot—with charm, it swirls horniness with helplessly nerdy literariness.' — Megan Milks, 4Columns
A perfect introduction to all things Gladman, certain to hook a whole new swath of readers.” — Drew Broussard, LitHub
Renee Gladman is an artist preoccupied with crossings, thresholds, and geographies as they play out at the intersections of writing, drawing and architecture. She is the author of numerous published works, including a cycle of novels about the city-state Ravicka and its inhabitants, the Ravickians—Event Factory (2010), The Ravickians (2011), Ana Patova Crosses a Bridge (2013), and Houses of Ravicka (2017)—all published by Dorothy. Recent essays and visual work have appeared in The Architectural Review, POETRY, The Paris Review, The Yale Review, and e-flux, in addition to several artist monographs and exhibition catalogs. Gladman’s first solo exhibition of drawings, The Dreams of Sentences, opened in fall 2022 at Wesleyan University, followed by Narratives of Magnitude at Artists Space in New York City in spring 2023. She has been awarded fellowships and artist residencies from the Menil Drawing Institute, Harvard Radcliffe Institute, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, among others, and received a Windham-Campbell prize in fiction in 2021. She makes her home in New England.