Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Open Me
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://www.lisalocascio.com/
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY: American
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: no2016105538
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/no2016105538
HEADING: Locascio, Lisa
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100 1_ |a Locascio, Lisa
370 __ |e Los Angeles (Calif.) |2 naf
372 __ |a Authorship–Fiction |a Criticism |2 lcsh
374 __ |a College teachers |2 lcsh
375 __ |a female
377 __ |a eng
670 __ |a Denny, Frances F. Let virtue be your guide, 2015
670 __ |a Radius Books website, viewed August 8, 2016: |b Frances F. Denny: Let virtue be your guide (lives in Los Angeles; her fiction and criticism has appeared in many magazines; BA in Individualized Study, and MFA in Fiction both at New York University; PhD in Creative Writing and Literature at the University of Southern California; teaches at the University of Southern California and in the Master of Fine Arts program in Creative Writing at Mount Saint Mary’s University) |u http://radiusbooks.org/books/frances-denny-let-virtue-be-your-guide/
670 __ |a Open me, 2018: |b ECIP t.p. (Lisa Locascio) data view (has been published in The Believer, Salon, n+1, Bookforum, Tin House, American Short Fiction, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. She is co-publisher of Joyland and editor of 7x7LA. Lisa currently teaches creative writing at Wesleyan. Open Me is her first novel)
PERSONAL
Married.
EDUCATION:New York University, B.A., M.F.A.; University of Southern California, Ph.D.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Author and educator; instructor in creative writing, Wesleyan University, University of Southern California and Mount Saint Mary’s University. Executive director, Mendocino Coast Writers Conference.
WRITINGS
Contributor to periodicals and media outlets, including American Short Fiction, Believer, Bookforum, Los Angeles Review of Books, n+1, Salon, and Tin House. Co-publisher, Joyland; editor, 7x7LA.
SIDELIGHTS
Wesleyan University creative writing instructor Lisa Locascio made her debut with Open Me, a novel of a young woman’s sojourn in Europe before beginning her college years. Eighteen-year-old Roxana Olsen has made plans to spend the summer in Paris with her best friend, but an administrative error sends her to Copenhagen instead of France. Roxana is “as confused as anyone who’s just graduated high school would be,” declared Ilana Masad in an NPR review. “She isn’t sure yet what she wants to study in college, she relies on her best friend Sylvie for support and affirmation, and her world is turned upside down.” “With an eye on adventure and a need to escape, Roxana accepts the offer,” stated a Kirkus Reviews contributor. “Shortly after arriving, she falls into a passionate relationship with Soren, her … mysterious tour guide.” He “suggests she ditch the program,” declared a Publishers Weekly reviewer, “and follow him to Farsø, a small town in the north of Denmark, for the summer.” “In the pages that follow,” Julie Buntin wrote in the New York Times Book Review, “Soren escorts Roxana through Copenhagen and she notes the movements of his arms, the dart of his tongue across his lips. She wonders what he smells like. When they finally sleep together, this accumulated observation boils over into a wash of erotic impressions.” However, Soren keeps Roxana a virtual hostage in the small town and she turns inward to escape the confines of her new life. “The lessons Roxana learns – how to think critically,” said Tess Tabak in the Furious Gazelle, “and make decisions for herself – are sorely needed in today’s politics, which have grown profoundly unethical. Open Me is a perfect beach read: deeper and darker than your average chicklit/erotic novel, but still gripping and light enough that, if you’re anything like me, you’ll breeze through it.”
Although Open Me in some ways resembles a traditional bildungsroman, critics pointed out that it also serves as a celebration of modern feminism. “Locascio manages in this novel to critique white supremacy and false tolerance,” Masad declared, “while also celebrating a young woman’s sexuality and her right to it — a difficult, and often joyous feat that marks her as a remarkable author to keep your eyes on.” “‘Open Me’ spends nearly as much descriptive time on mucus, crotch odors and the grime that accumulates in the creases of an unshowered body,” Buntin explained, “as it does on the violent beauty of sex — a choice perhaps even more daring than the novel’s nuanced exploration of a teenage girl’s sexual imagination.” “This provocative, intimate, and metamorphosing character study,” concluded Booklist reviewer Annie Bostrom, “vividly captures a young woman’s life-earned education.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, July, 2018, Annie Bostrom, review of Open Me.
Kirkus Reviews, June 1, 2018, review of Open Me.
New York Times Book Review, September 7, 2018, Julie Buntin, “He Wrote a Novel from Jail. She Wrote One about a Different Kind of Imprisonment.”
Publishers Weekly, June 25, 2018, review of Open Me, p. 158.
ONLINE
Bookreporter.com, https://www.bookreporter.com/ (October 24, 2018), author profile.
Furious Gazelle, http://thefuriousgazelle.com/ (August 8, 2018), Tess Tabak, review of Open Me.
Grove Atlantic, https://groveatlantic.com/ (October 24, 2018), author profile.
Lisa Locascio website, http://www.lisalocascio.com (October 24, 2018), author profile.
NPR, https://www.npr.org/ (August 18, 2018), Ilana Masad, “A Young Woman Claims Her Power in ‘Open Me.'”
Photograph by Michael Chylinski
Lisa Locascio's work has appeared in The Believer, Tin House, n+1, Bookforum, and many other magazines. She is the editor of the anthology Golden State 2017: Best New Writing from California, co-publisher of Joyland and editor of its West section, as well as of the ekphrastic collaboration magazine 7x7LA. She is Executive Director of the Mendocino Coast Writers Conference. Her novel Open Me is available now from Grove Atlantic.
Lisa tweets @senzaflash.
Lisa Locascio
Lisa Locascio’s work has been published in The Believer, Salon, n+1, Bookforum, Tin House, American Short Fiction, The Los Angeles Review of Books and elsewhere. She is co-publisher of Joyland and editor of 7x7LA. Lisa is the Executive Director of the Mendocino Coast Writers Conference. Open Me is her first novel.
Lisa Locascio
Lisa Locascio’s work has been published in The Believer, Salon, n+1, Bookforum, Tin House, American Short Fiction, The Los Angeles Review of Books and elsewhere. She is co-publisher of Joyland and editor of 7x7LA. Lisa currently teaches creative writing at Wesleyan. OPEN ME is her first novel.
Other voices, other rooms: part one
In the first of a series of interviews with contemporary American writers, Lisa Locascio meets Francine Prose
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As well as boasting the most apt literary surname around, Francine Prose has been a finalist for the National Book Award, a Director’s Fellow of the New York Public Library’s Center for Scholars and Writers and of the New York Institute for the Humanities, and the recipient of Washington University’s International Humanities Medal, two National Endowment for the Arts grants, a PEN translation prize, a Fulbright Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She is the author of over twenty-five books of fiction and nonfiction, including Household Saints (1981), The Lives of the Muses: Nine Women & the Artists They Inspired (2002), My New American Life (2011), Anne Frank: The Book, the Life, the Afterlife (2009) and the modern classic Reading Like A Writer (2006), which offers insights distilled over the course of a lifetime of close reading.
Prose’s diverse literary output is united by a piercing, often iconoclastic vision, a quality perhaps best demonstrated in her 1998 essay “Scent of a Woman’s Ink,” which took to task the literary establishment’s subtle hostility and outright misogyny towards women writers with laser-sharp indictments such as “If Norman Mailer didn’t exist, we might have had to invent the man who could utter, in Advertisements for Myself, history’s most heartfelt, expansive confession of gynobibliophobia.” Her insightful cultural commentary is also on display in novels such as Blue Angel (2000), which satirizes the life cycle of a sexually charged relationship between a writing professor and his precociously talented student, and A Changed Man (2005), which follows a young white supremacist’s attempt to better himself. Prose’s fiction stems from her unique readerly sensibility, a way of approaching literature, as she writes in Reading Like A Writer, “one word at a time, one punctuation mark at a time.”
Prose is no less eloquent on the subjects of her own writing process, the sacred cows of popular culture, and teaching, which she has done at nearly every American creative writing program of note, including Harvard, The Iowa Writers Workshop, Sarah Lawrence College, and New York University, where I was her student. Like her writing, Francine Prose herself is addictive and intense. I first laid eyes on Prose in 2005 at the New York State Summer Writers’ Institute, where she read from A Changed Man. Her beauty was striking, particularly her glossy black hair, which looked to me like a raven’s wing. But once she began to read, I found it difficult to focus on anything in the material world, so transfixing was her fiction.
Several years later, as a graduate student, I was Prose’s student in Craft of Fiction, a class in which she introduced us to unfairly obscure authors such as Victor Pelevin, Mavis Gallant, and Andrey Platonov and, through her incendiary and electrifying live close readings, gave new life to stalwarts including John Cheever and Anton Checkov. Through her mentorship, I came to understand the intimate truth of her statement in Reading Like A Writer: “What writers know is that, ultimately, we learn to write by practice, hard work, by repeated trial and error, success and failure, and from the books we admire.” Newly recovered from laryngitis, Prose kindly took the time to discuss these and other subjects with me from her home in New York.
Can you talk a little bit about your background? Where did you grow up? Did you have any early experiences that shaped your desire to write, or that hinted that this was the direction in which your life was headed?
I grew up in Brooklyn, the daughter of two doctors. Really, it was because I was a reader that I became a writer. I was always a reader; I read voraciously as a child. I took a couple of writing courses in college, and I wasn’t any better or worse than anyone else in those classes.
Then I spent a year in India after I graduated and started writing. I sent my first novel to a former professor of mine, who sent it on to his editor. And that was it, weirdly. As I’ve often said, it was all I could do. Not meaning that it was my vocation. I just actually couldn’t do anything else.
Why do you say that?
Well, because I still can’t do anything else, any of the normal things people do in the course of their daily lives! I don’t drive, I can’t operate any of the appliances in my house. I have one skill, which is writing.
That’s very modest. I also think you’re a great teacher.
Oh, thanks, I forgot about that! I think of that as a part of writing, in a certain way. The two things are connected in my mind. I don’t think of that as a separate thing to do.
You were briefly enrolled in a Ph.D. program at Harvard, which you left after reading One Hundred Years of Solitude [by Gabriel Garcia Márquez].
I was very unhappy there. As someone who, as I said, was always a reader and loved literature, I just literally couldn’t figure out what people were talking about in my seminars. I couldn’t figure out what they were saying. They might as well have been speaking Mandarin. I would sit there just getting crazier and crazier, singing songs to myself in my head. I had to leave. You have to work quite hard to fail out of graduate school, but I managed to do it. I stopped going to class.
I’ve never looked back. One of the happiest moments of my life was writing the letter to drop out of graduate school. Or mailing it, I guess.
This last book, the one I just finished, I hired this wonderful young French woman to look over it and find some awful mistakes I’d made. She’s a graduate student in comparative literature, and loves it, I guess. I keep referring to her as the happiest graduate student. It seems so rare.
When did you begin teaching?
I began teaching in the early Eighties, I guess. Well, I know exactly when, because my first job started like two weeks after my second son was born, so I spent the whole summer saying, Okay, you know, if he’s two weeks late, I have one week to get to Arizona [Prose taught at the University of Arizona, in Tucson]. But it all worked out. Fortunately, he was a very easy baby, and we just put him in the car and drove out. So that was 1982.
Were you teaching fiction writing?
I taught writing and a literature seminar. My classes were amazing. I taught there for two years, and I had a number of students who have since gone on to become writers. So I thought, boy, this is great, you know, you just have these super talented students, and you just do the kind of minimal thing, and they have careers. Little did I know that I was having a very rare and lucky experience.
Would you describe yourself as a writer with a definite process? A ritual or routine that has edified or changed over time?
No, no. It’s different from year to year and from day to day. Of course it depends on what other obligations I have. As everybody knows, people will pay you to do just about anything other than write for them, so I often have lecture responsibilities and reading dates and so on and so forth. And just living, too.
When I can, I sit down at my desk and work. But there’s no particular ritual or process, nothing like that.
So there’s no—I would never insult you by comparing you to Dan Brown, but there’s no “get up at 5 AM and do five hundred pushups” type thing going on?
No! It’s like, this morning I got up at six, and I thought, “Oh, I should really go to my desk,” and instead I ended up just kind of lying there, daydreaming, until my husband woke up at 7:30 and made coffee. So no. Would that I were that way, but I’m totally not.
You have often said that your work as a writer derives directly from your love of reading. What is the connection between the two activities?
There’s a kind of pleasure I always got from reading. It’s this private activity, a kind of communication between you and the writer. Similarly, on good days—and I mean only on good days—I get that kind of pleasure from writing, from communicating with that part of myself that is the writer.
So you see your writerly sensibility as a part of yourself, an especially perceptive self that you can access?
Yes. It’s very different from the part that interacts with the world, or the part that takes care of my grandchildren, or the part that rides the subway. It’s a very different activity. It seems different, what can I tell you? It’s something very, very particular. The best thing about it, in a way—certainly the best part of being a fiction writer—is the ability to not be that self that you normally are. To be somebody else.
I just wrote a little piece about pseudonyms for The New York Times, and I was saying that one of the pleasures of being a writer is that you get to impersonate someone else. And that’s kind of great. You can pretend, for however long it takes, that you’re someone entirely different from who you actually are.
In a January 2013 interview with the New York Times, you said that you liked the book you were then working on because you were able to get lost in it, and that you had to be able to get lost in a project to be able to write a book.
That book [Lovers At The Chameleon Club, Paris, 1932, which was published in April 2014] is finished. I miss it terribly. I really miss it terribly! For five years, I was living in Paris between 1924 and 1944—with all the ups and downs involved—and I often wish I were back there. I mean, it was a very difficult time, especially toward the end, but nonetheless it was a great deal of fun, and I really was lost in it. None of the characters—it has, I don’t know, six different voices—and none of them were my voice, at all. So when I was writing, I got to be a severely schizoid personality, just being one person after another who wasn’t me.
I really love the work that your nonfiction and essays do as intervention in popular fantasy.
[Laughs] That’s a great way of putting it, thank you.
[Laughs]. That’s a great way of putting it, thank you.
It’s always such a pleasure to read them. If you spend a lot of time at your computer, you’re just assaulted with all of this content. And if you’re a writer, you get depressed, thinking, all of this writing is here and it’s not mine, and I wonder how many of these people got paid. It’s such a relief to come upon your voice. I just read your piece in the New York Review of Books about Blue Jasmine [in which Prose writes:
“Blanchett’s performance is so riveting, and the film is so entertaining, that it took me until the next day to figure out why I’d found Blue Jasmine distasteful. That morning, my husband said he’d awoken in the middle of the night feeling as if we’d watched a film in which a woman is beaten, degraded, humiliated, tortured—a snuff film whose victim is driven mad but allowed to live.”].
That was so controversial, that piece! Did you see that it got over a hundred responses? They’ve been telling me it got more responses, on Facebook or something. It was shocking to me that people thought it was so unusual that someone would say that Woody Allen was a big misogynist. What could be more obvious, really? But the number of—well, to put it bluntly, men—who wrote in, saying I was an idiot who shouldn’t be writing for this blog or any other, was amazing to me. It always seems so obvious, and then I’m always so genuinely surprised when people think it’s a nervy position to take. Because it’s totally plain.
I actually didn’t know that the piece was controversial, but it doesn’t surprise me, because [Allen] is such a golden calf, isn’t he?
Why?
I don’t know. I remember being nineteen years old and watching Melinda and Melinda, one of his lesser offerings, in a movie theatre in New York with my mother. In the movie, all of these beautiful actresses are constantly telling each other, “You’re fat,” “You look ugly,” etcetera. And there’s a scene where a man asks the husband of a pregnant woman, “What’s it like to have sex with your wife while she’s pregnant?” And he says, “Oh, it’s no different from fucking a fat woman.”
It’s really gross, it’s just simply gross. And it’s equally gross that no one seems to know this. More gross, maybe.
It’s an echo of your very famous Harper’s essay, “Scent of A Woman’s Ink,” which I read when I was sixteen years old. This wonderful feeling of someone finally saying these things that are so obvious, and, I would argue, so obvious to many women. I don’t like to make gender distinctions, but I think with both Woody Allen and the writers you’re talking about in that essay, the misogyny isn’t a secret to women; it’s only strange for men to hear these things.
I know. It’s true, although, as I said in that Woody Allen piece, it was my husband, my incredibly great husband, who woke up in the middle of the night and said, “Oh, we just watched a snuff film starring Cate Blanchett.” He’s a perfectly normal man, he just happened to notice this.
It’s just a question of parting the veil, which I guess leads to the question of whether or not you see this work as political. Do you see your nonfiction as part of the same body of work as your fiction, or are they separate?
I think of them as quite separate. And yes, I see them as political. I mean, any kind of naturalistic fiction has to be political. We live in a world and politics are a part of that world. Among other things, my new novel is about a Nazi cross-dressing lesbian torturer in the 1940s. There were other things about her life, but just about everything about her life had some root in politics. She’s based on a historical figure. One of the reasons she became the person she became was that she was an athlete, and the French government took away her license to complete because she was a cross-dresser. Hitler found out about this and invited her to be his guest at the 1936 Olympics, and by the time she came back from Berlin, she was spying for the Nazis. So how much more political can you get?
Have you ever had the experience where you’re doing research for a piece of nonfiction and it turns into the inspiration for a piece of fiction, or the other way around?
This novel came about that way. It’s such a crazy story because it’s a true story, and also because it was originally based on a very famous Brassaï photograph of two women in a bar, in which one woman is wearing a tuxedo and the other is wearing an evening gown. This character is the woman in the tuxedo. I was originally thinking I would do it as a nonfiction book because it is such a crazy story. Then my French editor said, “Well, you know, the French are still so sensitive about their history of collaboration with the Nazis that you’re going to have to spend years doing research.” And I thought, you know what, I think I’ll do it as a novel.
In that same New York Times interview, you said something that I strongly agreed with, which was: “I can no more reread my own books than I can watch old home movies or look at snapshots of myself as a child. I wind up sitting on the floor, paralyzed by grief and nostalgia.” This statement made me curious about how revision works for you. Does the process of writing a book go relatively quickly because of this feeling, or is it project-specific how long the writing takes?
Well, it always depends on the particular thing, but I wasn’t really talking about that. I mean, there is always the feeling that the thing is just horribly bad. But I was really talking about some sort of Proustian thing. The weirdness of the past, that is, the impossibility of really connecting or understanding who that person was who wrote that particular book. It’s not that I’d go back and rewrite it all, although there’s sometimes that feeling. It’s more that I just feel so weirdly disassociated. I’ve been writing for such a long time, so the idea of reading something that I wrote twenty or thirty years ago is just so weird to me. It’s like meeting some old boyfriend and trying to figure out what you ever saw in this guy.
I understand that feeling. It’s not hatred, it’s melancholy. It reminds me of something you said when we read Soul by Andrey Platonov. There’s a line where—I’m paraphrasing—the characters “go out into the evening to have a sigh.” You said that when you first read it, you said to your husband, “That’s what I want to do! That’s the kind of person that I am,” and he said something like, “You know, you can’t always be going outside to have a sigh.”
Well, yeah. Absolutely. What a great line.
In your novels that I’ve read, and in what I’ve read about those that I haven’t, I think one thing you do really well and is really delicious in your books is the way that you trace several characters’ conflicting perceptions of themselves and of other people and events. There’s normally a dramatic movement that results in a satisfying dénouement as everyone realizes how wrong they were or how right they were. Is this a process that is generally interesting to you, or is it just a pattern I’m projecting onto your work?
It’s funny that you say that, because if I had to characterize what happens in this new novel, that’s as close as anything I could say. I mean, in the new book, nobody ever figures out what happens or what the real story was. Because it’s true, you know: you meet someone from your past, and suddenly you figure out that what you thought was happening had no relation to what the other person thought was happening. That’s very interesting to me. Because we all kind of think we’re right. And then it’s a shock, and a useful shock, to find out that that may be a relative term.
So it’s the idea of the dissonance of many peoples’ parallel perceptions.
Yes.
Another theme that’s been remarked upon in your fiction is a focus on epiphanic moments in human life, or attempts at epiphany through radical change.
Really? Because I don’t believe in that.
Tell me about that.
I got into a huge fight with some guy who was editing a book on how to write the short story, for which I wrote an essay about short stories. He said, “Oh, you left out the part about the epiphany.” And I said, “Well, that’s because I don’t really believe in it.” I haven’t had enough experience that would suggest to me that people learn from their experiences, so why should that be true in fiction if it’s not true in life? And he said, “You can’t have a story without an epiphany,” and I kept saying, “Well, actually, you can.” And finally, he was quite loathe to publish my essay, but he did.
I don’t believe in it. I don’t believe in it.
Why not?
Because I think it’s artificial, and I think it encourages people to read in a sort of ever-so-slightly self-helpy way, like “What has this character learned?” or “What can I learn?” It’s not about learning, it’s about the way the world is.
Have you ever undertaken a massive life-changing project, or does your disbelief in them preclude that possibility?
What do you mean by that?
Well, in [Prose’s 2005 novel] A Changed Man, all of the characters try so diligently to upend their self-perception. I’m thinking of moments in my own life when I’ve tried to change something about myself, and I think I agree with you that it’s not really possible; that’s definitely something I’ve learned by occasionally trying.
I think it’s going to happen whether you try or not! All you have to do is sit there and it’s going to happen. I mean, for one thing, you’re going to get older. For another, stuff is going to happen to you. I mean, I’ve never—yes, I decided to quit smoking and quit smoking. Certainly there was that. I had kids, I suppose that was a decision. There were plenty of things I did that had enormous effect. But I’m very bad at making resolutions; I can’t even take vitamins.
In that book I was interested in the way you pretend to change and maybe you actually do. In the way in which how other people see you can influence who you are. In the way that people’s petty vanities and blindnesses and limitations play out in their lives in ways that they aren’t quite conscious of.
When the book came out, the answer that I gave when people asked, “Why did you write this?” was that I saw these two neo-Nazis on the subway and I couldn’t get them out of my head. It was as simpleminded as that, in a way. I never start from an idea, ever. I never have any ideas. I just have little bits of plot or thought or something I see or something I hear. Something I read about. But I don’t have ideas! I do when I’m writing nonfiction. The Harper’s pieces come from ideas. But that’s not how fiction works for me.
What, then, inspired you to write Reading Like A Writer? That’s nonfiction, so that came from an idea, I’m guessing.
For one thing, I kept going to talk at MFA programs where the students didn’t seem to have read anything, so that was kind of a shock to me. But honestly, about half of that book—maybe a little more than half—came out of lectures that I had to give at various writers’ conferences where I taught when I was younger. If I taught at Bread Loaf or Sewanee or Warren Wilson, I had to give a lecture every summer, or sometimes twice. I wrote these pieces as lectures, and then I just put them all together.
I sat down and said, “Okay, look. It’s just too weird that people want to be writers and aren’t reading anything, especially since I don’t have an MFA, and that’s how I feel that I learned to write, so let me just talk about what that process was like.” I always have been and still am interested in the actual words on the actual page. Increasingly, since it seems to me that people don’t seem to notice or care or mind that something is just one cliché after another, I’m attentive to that sort of thing. I put the book together in the hopes that other people would be, too.
Were you surprised by the book’s reception?
Shocked. Everybody was shocked. The first printing was like 12,000 copies. As I’ve often said, I thought that the whole audience was a couple of desperate MFA instructors. What was very gratifying to me was that the readership wasn’t just people who wanted to write or writers, but it was also people who were readers, who looked to the book for suggestions about what to read or how to read. And when I would travel or talk about the book, the people who came up to me were passionate readers, all over the place. All different sorts of people. That was very encouraging, because of course we hear all the time that nobody’s reading anymore, which is quite discouraging if you happen to be a writer. But that seemed clearly not to be the case. There is a world of readers.
What do you think of the oft-repeated advice that authors should write every day for a set amount of time? We’ve established that that’s not your writing routine, but I’m curious about your opinion because I think this is something that, while generally positive, has become sort of a bludgeon for young writers and students of writing, this sort of Protestant work ethic of sitting down and filling out your ledger every day. Is this a method that’s useful to you?
Well, two things. I think it’s just insane to think that what’s going to work for somebody else is going to work for you. That’s just asking for trouble. It’s ridiculous. It’s just not true. Someone else might need to write every day, and you might need to write every ten days.
But also, what I think is also slightly more insidious is that it’s part of the way writing is talked about more and more, as if it’s some sort of profession that you practice, like law or orthodontics or something. And that’s not the case either. It’s not a profession. It’s not amenable to the rules of a profession, no matter how much people want it to be.
Do you mean in terms of the imposition of the daily schedule?
Well that, certainly, and then also the idea that there’s a career trajectory that you’re intended to follow, the way you might hope that you go to Harvard Law School, and then you get on the law review, and then you find—I don’t know what you do, an internship with a really important law firm, and then you work, and make partner—I don’t know how that works, even. But that’s the idea, you know: you go to the right MFA program, and you find the right agent, and you get published in the right journals, etcetera, etcetera. Well, I can think of very few writers I admire in the past who could have functioned in that system
It doesn’t leave a lot of room for contemplation or human error or personal development.
Or insanity! One year, years ago, I taught a literature class at Bard College called “Strange Books,” in which I just picked the fifteen strangest books I could think of. And most of the writers on that list, or quite a few of them that I can think of, anyway, had either been institutionalized or could have been or should have been, and could not have gotten through any kind of academic program.
When I was your student, you said in class once that many of the best writers who you studied with ended up institutionalized.
Yeah! Or dead. Not that one would wish that on anybody, but again, it’s not a profession. Writing is not something that rewards you for—I mean, maybe it does reward you, what do I know?—but for just figuring things out the way you would in another profession and just going for it in that way.
Would you call it a vocation, or is that even too on-the-nose?
I don’t know what it is, but it’s none of those things, I would think. I would call it an activity. I mean, I don’t know. I call it something you do. I call it something you can’t help doing. I call it a compulsion, let me put it that way. Compulsion is probably the closest to what it is.
I think that one of the problems with fitting writing into the academy is that it does create the illusion of a linear trajectory. Someone who is young and bright and interested in writing sees a path through these programs that might not be there.
Right. I mean, I think that graduate programs are very useful. I tell my students, if you’re going to get money, if someone is going to pay you to be a graduate student and it means you don’t have to work as a waitress for a year, that’s great! That is really great. But if you’re going to wind up with a considerable amount of debt for something where the payoff is not really clear, I’m not really sure how great that is.
Given these structural impediments—the unlikelihood of getting paid, the attrition of jobs in fields like journalism and university teaching—what do you tell your undergraduates and graduate students, given that you don’t see this as a career path? What is your advice—to find something else that you can do and do it while also writing?
Well, for starters, I say, if you think you’re going to make a lot of money very fast, or you think you’re going to have a really glamorous life, or you don’t have a lot of patience for spending ten hours a day by yourself, or you don’t desperately care about the fact that something with a typo might go out with your name on it—any one of those things—but basically, unless you can’t get through a day without writing, there’s no reason to do it. I mean, not a day, per se. But unless you can’t live without it, there’s no reason to do it.
There are enough writers. It’s a hard life. The rewards are slim at best. It requires a tremendous amount of resilience. It’s not the easy path to a glamorous career.
Since we’re talking about graduate creative writing programs, do you share the concerns that many people have about the impact of workshop on fiction—the idea that it standardizes or makes the individual voice bland?
Well of course it depends who’s teaching it, you know? My friend Deborah Eisenberg teaches, and if I were a student, I would pay money to be in her workshop. But again, I’m not sure she teaches the usual class. As I said, I was just teaching a couple of classes in Toronto, and I felt that when I was doing it, I finally found a way to do it which I felt very good about, which didn’t make me feel like I was participating in something beside the point. And that was—I mean, it’s more work for the teacher, but that’s too bad—I did a very, very close reading of the students’ work before class, and then brought it in, and when we went over the manuscript students were essentially forbidden to talk about anything that wasn’t on the page. The writer was encouraged to ask questions, particularly if something wasn’t clear or she didn’t understand something.
So we got rid of this ridiculous gag rule, where you have to sit there and listen to people talk about things you had no intention of doing. It really got away from the stupid things people so often say in those classes. They couldn’t say, “I think you should rewrite this from the dog’s point of view.” That couldn’t happen, because the dog’s point of view wasn’t on the page, so I wasn’t really interested in hearing what the dog would have said.
In a discussion we had several years ago, you said that if someone gave you ten million dollars to start your own graduate creative writing program, it would be based totally around a curriculum of close reading. You would do away with workshops, and have all response to student writing come in the form of close mentor relationships.
Yes. I still feel that way.
The idea has stayed with me very strongly, especially after I began teaching and working with students. You see the bad behavior that can develop inside a workshop.
There’s something essentially sadistic about the workshop, and that sadism is encouraged. I mean, really, you could not pay me money to sit in a room with a group of relative strangers and listen to them talk about my work. I did it as an undergraduate, and it was fine, but it was fine mainly because in those days, this was before not only the internet but also before photocopying. We had to read our work aloud, and—I don’t know how we did it, in retrospect—and you could really tell when the interest in what you were reading was strong or not so strong, and that was incredibly useful. But no one told me to rewrite it from the dog’s point of view.
I think that workshop is important at a very specific stage of a writer’s development, and then has to be gotten rid of almost immediately for the writer to continue to grow.
Well, but also, if the writer pays attention to what’s being said, they have only themselves to blame. What are you going to do: follow your own lights, or listen to what other people think? It’s like a driving school that’s being driven by other driving students. No one teaches brain surgery by encouraging other medical students to tell each other what they think of the operation.
In a way the workshop, although venerated, is a stopgap measure. Programs don’t have the vision or the money or the time or the faculty to create just the one-on-one readerly interaction, so the group environment sits in instead.
Right. And also, the great thing is that it employs a lot of writers. I shouldn’t be badmouthing it, because it kept my family alive for a number of years. So, you know, thank you very much. But again, it wasn’t the way I would have chosen to teach.
Do you take breaks between the completion of one project and the beginning of another? Are you working on anything now that you’re willing to talk about?
I like to work on nonfiction between novels. I have great admiration and envy for people who can just pop one novel out after another, but I can’t. I’m working on a short biography of Peggy Guggenheim for Yale University Press. I did it because I was interested in her life, but also because it was a way of kind of staying in the same world in which my novel had been set, so it satisfied both things at once.
Any last words to those beleaguered MFA instructor types who may be reading this interview?
Look, here’s what I would say to those beleaguered: the jury is always going to be out on whether you can teach people to write, but what’s absolutely and demonstrably true is that you can teach people to line-edit, and the better your ability to line-edit, the better your ability to write. So that’s a very useful function that can be performed. If you’re teaching a freshman composition class with forty students, it’s very hard to do that. But if you’re teaching a workshop with twelve or fifteen, you can actually sit down with students and say “Look. Cut this, add this, this is the wrong word.” And that’s useful.
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Locascio, Lisa: OPEN ME
Kirkus Reviews.
(June 1, 2018):
COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Locascio, Lisa OPEN ME Grove (Adult Fiction) $25.00 8, 14 ISBN: 978-0-8021-2807-2
A young woman traveling abroad gets far more than she bargained for.
Imbued with sex and politics, Locascio's debut novel casts the traditional bildungsroman into a darker, more
feminine light. In the wake of her parents' divorce, 18-year-old Roxana can't wait for her pre-college studyabroad
trip to Paris. Shortly before her departure, the travel agency informs her that while she can no longer
go to Paris, she has been offered a spot in their Copenhagen program. With an eye on adventure and a need
to escape, Roxana accepts the offer. Shortly after arriving, she falls into a passionate relationship with
Soren, her older, mysterious tour guide. When Soren invites her to spend the summer in rural Denmark, she
says yes. In the empty, white apartment, Roxana begins to explore the pleasures of her body with and
without Soren. While Soren becomes more unpleasant and less recognizable, Roxana's desires--for
companionship, touch, and adulthood--threaten to consume them both. As Soren pulls away, Roxana is
drawn to a Bosnian refugee named Zlatan, whom locals call Geden, meaning "the Goat." From their politics
to their treatment of Roxana, the two men could not be more different. As she's pushed to the shadowy
periphery of Soren's life, the novel--like Roxana--begins to turn inward. There are fewer flashbacks and
longer, claustrophobic stretches detailing Roxana's body, her longings, and the space she inhabits. The
novel's sometimes-deliberate sparseness gives way to sensual and frank descriptions of genitalia, bodily
functions, and domesticity: "The way formless hours could fall wide as splayed knees" and "the space
between my legs became the center of everything, opened like a peeled grapefruit." Above all else,
Locascio centers the female body exquisitely.
A debut exploring how we open up to others--and, more importantly, ourselves.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Locascio, Lisa: OPEN ME." Kirkus Reviews, 1 June 2018. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A540723409/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=4178e734.
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Open Me
Publishers Weekly.
265.26 (June 25, 2018): p158+.
COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Open Me
Lisa Locascio. Grove, $25 (288p) ISBN 978-08021-2807-2
A young American's exploration of what it means to be desired and her near-constant quest for sex are the
focus of Locascio's raunchy yet flat debut. Eighteen-year-old Roxana is scheduled to embark on a summer
study abroad program to Paris with her best friend. When Roxana gets bumped to Copenhagen instead, she
lies to her parents about her travel plans and decides to make the best of her experience on her own in
Denmark--especially after she meets her attractive 28-year-old guide, S0ren. But then, S0ren suggests she
ditch the program and follow him to Fars0, a small town in the north of Denmark, for the summer while he
works on his graduate thesis. The romance starts out delightfully domestic but becomes progressively
claustrophobic as Roxana beings spending her days indoors without a key, cleaning, masturbating, and
waiting for S0ren to return so they can have sex. In turn, increasingly whiny S0ren has trouble writing his
thesis and resents Roxana for her lusty behavior. The novel's focus on Roxana's obsession with discovering
the power of her body ("The space between my legs became the center of everything") comes off as navelgazing
rather than titillating or erotic. Readers will find themselves wishing for more from Roxana and her
awakening. Agent: Marya Spence, Janklow &Nesbit Assoc. (Aug.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Open Me." Publishers Weekly, 25 June 2018, p. 158+. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A545023375/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=08ad0c0d.
Accessed 29 Sept. 2018.
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Book Review: Open Me by Lisa Locascio
AUGUST 8, 2018 / THE FURIOUS GAZELLE EDITORS / 0 COMMENTS
Review by Tess Tabak
When a mixup sends Roxana, an 18-year-old girl, to Copenhagen, a mysterious Danish man named Soren whisks her away to live out one of his sexual fantasies.
I’m not quite sure I’d describe Open Me as an erotic novel, even though it’s marketed as such. It contains elements of that genre – the story exists in somewhat of a fantasy state. Through a series of odd circumstances, our heroine is trapped in another country, completely alone, at the mercy of an attractive stranger. But I’m hesitant to label this book erotica. There is a strong sense of the body in this book, but actually very little sex. It dwells more on the protagonist, Roxana, and her growing understanding of what it means to be a woman. She feels a strong desire at the start of the book to be acted upon, to be a completely passive participant in lovemaking. By the end, she learns that passivity isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
Erotica or not, Open Me is a gorgeously written book. The author, Lisa Locascio, takes impossible-to-describe feelings and puts words to them. Roxana talks about her “cathedral feeling,” the private thrill she felt when hearing music played on a church organ for the first time. The author has an intimate understanding of the inner workings of young girls, and the loneliness of not being able to share those special feelings. When Roxana tries to tell her best friend about the cathedral feeling, a sarcastic comment bursts the bubble. “And again I was a bag of feelings with no start and no end, a tunnel through which sensation moved.”
At times, Roxana feels somewhat too canny for her age (18), but I don’t mind. She’s caught in between the naivety of youth, and the precipice of adulthood, where she perhaps thinks she knows more than she does. There’s a recurring theme in the book that she wants to be “opened,” to be known completely by her romantic partner. When a stranger offers her a chance to live in his apartment, she leaps at the chance. The relationship has a fairly creepy overtone. However, the author knows what she’s doing, and takes the book to a very smart place. Once Roxana is alone with Soren, she realizes that he’s not that interested in knowing her, and that she actually knows very little about him. This is exactly the kind of mistake it’s believable for an 18-year-old to make. Through Roxana’s guilelessness, Locascio recreates the feeling of finding yourself trapped in an abusive relationship. After several weeks, Soren becomes moody, withdrawn and depressed. The warning signs were there at the beginning, but Roxana, sure of herself, chooses to ignore them at her peril. Just when you think you know where the book is heading, it swerves.
There’s also a conversation in this book about refugees – one of Soren’s more unpleasant qualities is his xenophobia. Again, the back of the book bills this as a political novel, and I’m not quite sure the description fits. The conversation is there, but the author’s focus is more on the people involved – their sense of ethics, the ways in which they are misguided. On the other hand, the lessons Roxana learns – how to think critically, and make decisions for herself – are sorely needed in today’s politics, which have grown profoundly unethical. Open Me is a perfect beach read: deeper and darker than your average chicklit/erotic novel, but still gripping and light enough that, if you’re anything like me, you’ll breeze through it.
Open Me was released August 7, 2018 from Grove Atlantic Press.
The Furious Gazelle received a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.
A Young Woman Claims Her Power In 'Open Me'
August 18, 20187:00 AM ET
ILANA MASAD
Open Me
Open Me
by Lisa Locascio
Hardcover, 279 pages purchase
Young women occupy a perilous space in the world: Their bodies are desired, their youth fetishized, and they're simultaneously placed on a pedestal and reviled as maddeningly seductive. Rarely, if ever, are their own desires allowed to flourish without judgment, slut-shaming side-eye, or envious jabs. And if they are left alone, they often fall into the opposite trap of considering themselves unwanted, unwantable, their desirability carefully measured by culture, fashion, and violence. It is against the grim backdrop of this reality that Lisa Locascio's debut novel, Open Me, shines so brightly.
Roxana, who narrates the novel, is only 18, and as confused as anyone who's just graduated high school would be. She isn't sure yet what she wants to study in college, she relies on her best friend Sylvie for support and affirmation, and her world is turned upside down when her parents announce they are getting divorced. On top of all that, Roxana was meant to spend the summer in Paris with Sylvie, but the company they booked their study abroad experience with screwed up, and so in the opening pages of the novel, Roxana arrives alone in Denmark instead of France.
Søren meets Roxana when she gets off the plane in Copenhagen. Charged with helping her settle in, the 28-year-old Søren becomes entranced by the American in his care, and she, feeding off his desire while developing her own, is just as excited by him. Over the course of the novel we learn about Roxana's early solo sexual experiences, and the development of her fantasy life — but the only person she's been with physically was a disappointing boy named Hunter. Now, with Søren, it's different:
So many times I had imagined how it would happen, how I would get to be in this place, the close place, the sex place, the space of nudity and bodies together, rotating in whichever face, but all I had to go on were movies and television and books, dreams and the playground with Hunter. Nothing real. None of it shimmered. But now it was me. I was the shimmering thing.
And so it begins. Roxana recognizes the dynamics of this moment: "Power, I thought, power, power. My power."
She changes her plans, leaves behind the structured student experience she's supposed to have and goes off with Søren, who is trying to finish his thesis on African-American literature. They set up house together in his uncle's empty apartment, but things begin to go south quickly. For one thing, Søren leaves Roxana without a key, meaning she's stuck in the apartment while he goes to work at the library. For another, she begins to see a side of him she doesn't appreciate, a cold and angry side that, for discerning readers, was present long before Roxana faces it. But ultimately, no matter how much Søren may try to isolate Roxana and manipulate her, she doesn't quite become his victim. She is too sure of her physical needs and pleasures, too wrapped up in a fantasy that keeps her strong and safe because it allows her to shape reality into something thrilling, even in the depths of boredom.
Locascio manages in this novel to critique white supremacy and false tolerance while also celebrating a young woman's sexuality and her right to it.
Locascio deliberately sets the novel in Denmark in 2010, before the European refugee crisis that started in 2015, so the xenophobia Roxana witnesses in Søren isn't the result of a new problem, but rather a longstanding issue. When she meets a refugee from Serbia, known by locals as Geden, she's fascinated by him — first, because Søren hates him on principal, and how thrilling to grow close to someone her bitter, angry host disapproves of! And, second, because he is interesting and attractive to her, and one thing Roxana is learning during her time abroad is that she can ask for what she wants. Geden tells her that "Scandinavians do not like the idea that anyone would have reservations about their country, even the passing thought that it might not be the best place in the world. They require absolute conformity and obedience. They have fetishized the art of tolerance, but only as an accessory."
In Søren, Roxana witnesses a deep-rooted xenophobia tied up in love of country, and she doesn't stay silent — she tries to both understand where he's coming from and argue with him. Until, that is, it becomes clear to her that there's no point: "Trying to understand him was trying to do what he would not do for anyone else, I realized suddenly. The knowledge tasted bitter." Still, she stays, at least for a while, until she finds another option, another fantasy she can fulfill.
Locascio manages in this novel to critique white supremacy and false tolerance while also celebrating a young woman's sexuality and her right to it — a difficult, and often joyous feat that marks her as a remarkable author to keep your eyes on.
Ilana Masad is an Israeli-American fiction writer, book critic, essayist, and editor for hire.
FICTION
He Wrote a Novel From Jail. She Wrote One About a Different Kind of Imprisonment.
By Julie Buntin
Sept. 7, 2018
CHERRY
By Nico Walker
317 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $26.95.
OPEN ME
By Lisa Locascio
279 pp. Grove Press. $25.
In the prologue to “Cherry,” the incarcerated novelist Nico Walker’s debut novel, our unnamed narrator shoots heroin with his ex-wife-turned-live-in-girlfriend, Emily. After the dull needle finds his vein he wakes up on the kitchen floor with ice jammed into his underwear — Emily’s attempt to shock him out of overdose. This is our introduction to our narrator’s lodestar. “I love her so much it feels like dying,” he thinks two pages later, high now and on his way to an ill-fated bank robbery. “She’s a beauty and I tell her so all the time. I think she’d do anything for me.”
Image
Nico Walker
CreditCourtesy of The Author
Probably, she would. By the end of the more than 300 pages, the reader still doesn’t know enough about Emily to argue otherwise. Though she’s one of the novel’s organizing principles — the story starts and ends with her — Emily is essentially a quirky collection of details used to give meaning to the narrator’s existence. Recalling having first met her in a college English class in Ohio, the narrator reflects with shame that his first thought about Emily was one of physical desire: “But it was a matter of fate, or something to that effect, what would bring us together, regardless if I ever deserved her.” When Emily transfers to a school in Montreal, he drops out and decides to join the Army. He spends a year serving as a medic in Iraq, and comes back changed; and yet their relationship survives, impossible though it sometimes seems. The novel tracks this progression, as well as their eventual descent into a collaborative junkie hell.
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By the time heroin addiction catches them in its jaws, Emily is in her mid-20s, teaching college writing and helping the narrator, who is halfheartedly taking classes on the G.I. Bill, grow marijuana in a tent in their living room. After the plants flower and dry, they flip them for dope money. Emily orders salad at McDonald’s. She says “man” a lot. Her male friends want to sleep with her. Our narrator loves the way she “cussed with great beauty” and “always gave you everything and she wasn’t ever fake about it.” That she’s less a woman than a collage at first doesn’t seem much of an issue — the novel is told in the first person, after all, limited to the narrator’s perspective, and what lover can ever truly see his or her beloved? But what’s glossed over ultimately mitigates the intensity of their romance. We never learn why Emily wanted to transfer to a school in Montreal, for instance; though we’re told she’s smart (it’s a point of pride with the narrator), we’re rarely given access to conversations in which she says what she wants or doesn’t want, or shares what she thinks.
This shortsightedness doesn’t stop at Emily. Women, when they appear, are categorized by their sexual availability and desirability. Often they’re given no name, and simply assigned to a male character — his woman, his girl. What’s meant by this construct is unclear. Of course, some men really talk this way, but accuracy as justification seems at odds with how the narrator intends to be perceived. He’s a self-professed “scumbag,” sure, but he also underscores his vegetarianism and claims, “I take all the beautiful things to heart … till I about die from it.” He’s sensitive, not to mention extremely damaged by his time at war. But his flashes of gooey adoration for Emily and moments of sympathy for other women feel less genuine than put-on, as if they’ve been carefully planted to distract us from the casual sexism inherent in his voice. I got the impression I was meant to like him. It’s a miracle I credit to the urgency of every aspect of this novel outside of the love story that I often did.
Image
“Cherry” is a singular portrait of the opioid epidemic and the United States’ failure to provide adequate support to veterans. It’s full of slapstick comedy, despite gut-clenching depictions of dope sickness, the futility of war and PTSD. The sections on Army life in and out of Iraq offer a searing glimpse into the wretchedness of that American disaster. (“Fort Hood was bleak, a new kind of desert, engineered to induce fatalism in the young. It worked like a charm.”) As a stylist, Walker is un-self-conscious and rangy. He has a gift for the strategically deployed profanity, and writes dialogue so musical and realistic you’ll hear it in the air around you. He can pull off judicious caps lock. And yet, it’s a struggle to root for a novel that relies on a woman for narrative structure even as it constantly undermines her humanity.
Emily feels even more spectral in contrast to the all-too-concrete Soren, the primary love interest in Lisa Locascio’s debut novel, “Open Me.” Due to an administrative mix-up, the 18-year-old narrator, Roxana Olsen, who is supposed to be studying abroad in Paris with her best friend, has instead been sent to Denmark. At the airport, bleary with jet lag, she’s scooped up by Soren, a 28-year-old representative from International Abroad Experiences, the program responsible for the mismanagement of her eight-week trip. From their first meeting, Roxana’s perception narrows; despite the newness of her surroundings, all she can see is Soren: “His eyes the blue of a frozen morning under brows like smudges of ash. … He took my hand as if to shake it but didn’t close the grip. My fingers swam in his, little fish.”
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In the pages that follow, Soren escorts Roxana through Copenhagen and she notes the movements of his arms, the dart of his tongue across his lips. She wonders what he smells like. When they finally sleep together, this accumulated observation boils over into a wash of erotic impressions of both Soren’s body and the ever-changing shape of Roxana’s pleasure. “I bucked and roiled under his tongue and lips and face, falling through a collapsing series of rooms, one into another after another after another, into a shapeless, wonderful bottomlessness.” Locascio is a lovely, imagistic writer, and she’s especially exquisite on the female orgasm, evoking a purple smoke that becomes a motif. “My body took over, tightening and releasing a deep muscle, trying to trap his tongue, to keep him there forever. … Purple, I thought, purple. I saw purple smoke and I came in his mouth.”
Image
Lisa Locascio
CreditFrances F. Denny
After this scene, it is no surprise when Roxana accepts Soren’s invitation to abandon the program and accompany him to his uncle’s apartment in the northern peninsula of Jutland, where he plans to work on his Ph.D. thesis, a study of racial identity in the work of a fictional African-American writer, Viola Ash. In Jutland, “Open Me” transforms from a well-written and recognizable Bildungsroman (younger woman meets older man abroad, education ensues) into something much darker, and more interesting. Soren shares a fantasy he’s had since boyhood — of leaving home and coming back to a woman who has spent all day in the house, “keeping the home fires bright.” He repeatedly forgets to make an additional key for the auto-locking apartment door, effectively trapping Roxana inside each morning as he heads to the library. For weeks, she doesn’t leave, half-choosing and half-forced into fulfilling Soren’s dream. This, too, is a subversion of the study-abroad narrative: Instead of being transformed by the external world, Roxana dives inward, spending her days discovering the possibilities of her own pleasure.
Roxana obsessively objectifies Soren, but there’s no question he has an inner life she can only guess at; each day he enters the world, leaving her behind. After she gets her period and bleeds onto the bedsheets, Soren begins rejecting her advances, suddenly disgusted by the intensity of her desire and the reality of her body. But Roxana revels in it. “Every membranous violet smear on the gritty toilet paper was proof to me that I existed. … All day I flitted from bodily need to bodily need.” “Open Me” spends nearly as much descriptive time on mucus, crotch odors and the grime that accumulates in the creases of an unshowered body as it does on the violent beauty of sex — a choice perhaps even more daring than the novel’s nuanced exploration of a teenage girl’s sexual imagination.
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Roxana tries in vain to reignite Soren’s attraction until her fantasies find a new object in Zlatan Zlatar, a local Balkan refugee of whom Soren expresses a hatred laced with anti-immigrant sentiments. Witnessing Soren’s xenophobia, Roxana remains silent, protests weakly or twists herself into defending his thoughts by underscoring how little she knows about Denmark. In this way, she’s complicit. If, when she embarks on an affair with Zlatan, it is to be read in part as a rejection of Soren’s views, Roxana’s sexualization of Zlatan’s perceived otherness chimes uncomfortably with Soren’s thinking.
Though the framework is familiar, “Open Me” explodes clichés of female sexuality. On sex and love, it feels transgressive, whereas “Cherry,” for all its freshness of voice, gave me a case of déjà vu.
Julie Buntin is the author of “Marlena.”
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A version of this article appears in print on Sept. 8, 2018, on Page 18 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Places of Imprisonment. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
Open Me.
Locascio, Lisa (author).
Aug. 2018. 288p. Grove, $25 (9780802128072).
REVIEW. First published July, 2018 (Booklist).
When a study-abroad company inadvertently bumps Roxana from the high-school graduation trip to Paris she planned with her best, and only, friend, she accepts the offer to attend its Copenhagen program for free instead. An introverted only child staggered by her parents’ impending divorce, she keeps the last-minute switch from even them. Søren, 10 years her senior, is her Copenhagen guide and, nearly immediately, astonishingly, her lover. Drunk on hope and many beers, she easily agrees to spend the duration of her trip in a small northern town where they can live in his uncle’s apartment while Søren works on his thesis. Locascio practically invents a new language, conjuring pure feelings and colors, for their sex, which casts a strong spell over Roxana until, almost as quickly, Søren closes himself to her. Simultaneously naive and aware, Roxana holds on until Søren’s darkness becomes impossible to ignore, and her curiosity about a Bosnian refugee whom Søren derides overtakes all else. This provocative, intimate, and metamorphosing character study vividly captures a young woman’s life-earned education.— Annie Bostrom