loved this book. celine and julie are two narrative mirrors erupting out of a desert in new mexico. consistently smart. a work that through anecdote, analysis, and aphorism — along with elemental doses of despair and anger — exposes the systemic construction and confines of “girlhood,” arguably defined here as an integral, lower limit Tiqqun upper limit Bratmobile.
or, another way: the various acts of defining found to be inextricably tautological to the problem. this dilemma at the heart of the book. murphy in an interview says: “For a long time the manuscript was developing as a longer and longer narrative essay and a series of poems. Both tried to get at some central questions, namely: Why does girlhood feel like a trap?…”
published by the on fire Canadian small press bookthug : won’t you seek it out?
joni murphy interviewed by chris kraus
and with tobias carroll:
I needed to find a way of communicating that this story was not really about the two main characters, that fiction uses individuals to get people to care about society, but that can become a way of fetishizing the singular. I would never write a story from the point of view of a girl working in a maquiladora in Juarez, but neither would I want to just describe their bodies as things (as Bolaño did to devastating effect in 2666) because I related to them as beings, but at the same time I am not in their position.
So the end of this book, this different style, was my way of saying individuals matter, but we’re all embedded in systems and structures. They/ we belong to a world of connections in which we’re told these connections don’t exist. Only when a pattern is overwhelmingly horrific does it get recognized as a pattern.