Hotel Impala
Pat Spears
Twisted Road Publications, 2024, 392 pages
$19.95

Reviewed by Roberta Arnold

In this stunning, literary tour-de-force, Pat Spears once again brings us into the courageous humanity found among the dire, inexplicably brutal and intertwined human situations of poverty on a lesbian. The novel is defined by characters in chapter headings by name: Leah, the mother who wants to feel the creative reach of being without the drugs that quell the disease but leave her feeling mentally deadened; Grace, the budding teenager who tries to manage her mother whirling in and out of the throes of mental illness; Daniel, the gentle father who tries to keep his family together without sufficient means; the youngest, Zoe who is just barely allowed her child feelings; and the lesbian policewoman who comes to their aid. Other vivid characters remain in one’s memory well after they leap from the page with fast-moving action, defining the inner and outer reach of a community.

Complicated by a failed social system and the mother’s driving desire for creative inspiration, the family system breaks apart. The father and daughter and lesbian officer tenuously set about putting it back together again like a home of pick-up-sticks with a hurricane threatening on the horizon. What feels like a descent into an increasingly untenable situation with danger around every corner is buoyed by the writing flowing evenly in seamless chapters. Hope is found by defining the abiding truths: inherent in the carefully fleshed-out layers of each person is a force striving towards what is true within community and love. I was most struck by the character of Grace, the iconic lesbian child, somehow still blooming with desires despite the hard realities poverty creates. Like Dorothy Allison’s wise reminders, Spears’ novel teaches us how survival in an impossible system is a constant struggle of grace and grit. The quote at the front of the book opens the door to this kind of thought, almost as a caution light to stay vigilant and not take everything at face value as the quote implies: “Things come apart so easily when they have been held together with lies.” (Dorothy Allison, Bastard Out of Carolina).

This is the third book by Spears, and it is another lesbian classic. I recommend it for anyone who works in a shelter, social services, a mental health profession, or anyone who wants to imagine how someone being given the least amount of chances can survive–or not. I would pair this book with Phyllis Chesler’s famous treatise on bias towards women in the mental health profession, Women and Madness (1972), and Mab Segrest’s brilliant exposé, Administrations of Lunacy: Racism and the Haunting of American Psychiatry at the Milledgeville Asylum. All three combine to create a stark gut-punch hit of awareness about what happens to women with mental health struggles. In Hotel Impala, Spears makes it impossible to turn a blind eye to the struggle of women’s mental health by bringing the point home to the caring daughter. The strong lesbian daughter character of Grace elicits hope that will be re-writing the endings.

Roberta Arnold I am a lop-sided lesbian elder living in the mountains of Southwest Virginia. I am very close, physically and mentally, to my sister, my dog, and my cat–not one who belongs to me though I hold each one close to my heart. I walk and swim and read and write and find myself in awe of nature and animals. I was born in Houston, raised in New York City, and have done a fair bit of seeing the world. In my good fortune, I came from an unusual lesbian-feminist-author mother, June Arnold. I’ve published stories and book reviews in Sinister Wisdom: A Multicultural Lesbian Literary & Art Journal. Back in the 1970s, I sat on a grassy lawn and wrote a short story for Ain’t I A Woman? Press in Iowa City, Iowa, when traveling across the country with a van full of radical dykes. This journey was outlined by me and my outlaw compadres in Sinister Wisdom 95, Reconciliations, 1971 Dyke Outlaw Roadtrip. With my sister, I wrote a tribute to my mother in Sinister Wisdom 89: Once and Later. More recently, I had a book review about Andrea Dworkin in Ms. Magazine. I volunteer and serve on the board at Sinister Wisdom and am a member of Dykewriters and OLOC.