I Remember Her
Natalie Clifford Barney, translated by Suzanne Stroh
Headmistress Press, 2025, 132 pages
$30.00

Reviewed by Rhea Rollmann

This year marks the 150th birthday of one of history’s most iconic Sapphists.

Natalie Clifford Barney may have had the misfortune of being born in the United States, but once she came into her multi-million inheritance at the age of twenty-six, she settled permanently in her preferred home of Paris, where she had already lived off and on for much of her youth. There, she set out to accomplish her goal “to make my life itself into a poem,” pursuing a series of Sapphic affairs that would make an L Word scriptwriter blush. At the same time she put her inherited fortune to good use, supporting the lifestyles and art of a whole coterie of other lesbian and queer writers, artists, and poets.

Turn-of-the-century France, and Paris in particular, was preferred by Sapphists for a reason. Barney herself described it as “the only city where you can live and express yourself as you please.” As Jean Chalon put it in his hagiographic biography of Barney based on interviews conducted toward the end of her life:

The Americans of the thirties were still prudes for whom Natalie was the personification of sin. Natalie had understood this perfectly when at the end of the last century she had left her country, where, despite her fortune, she would always have been a pariah, a Sappho of Washington. (Portrait of a Seductress: The World of Natalie Barney, 1977).

Unfortunately, hurling herself into Parisian literary life meant most of her written work was also produced in French, and shockingly little has been translated into English. Happily, a new collection of her poetry has appeared in English translation. I Remember Her, translated by Suzanne Stroh, is a must for fans of Sapphic poetry and history alike, valuable as much for its extensive essay on Barney’s life (including new research) as for the beauty and rhythm of the translated prose poems.

I Remember Her was composed as part of Barney’s effort to woo back her former lover, Renée Vivien. Vivien was a poetess of British origin living in Paris, whose real name was Pauline Tarn. The two had separated after a tumultuous two-year romance, driven apart as much by Barney’s polyamorous lifestyle (she valued her autonomy and, while a fiercely loyal friend to her various lovers, refused to remain exclusively bound to any of them), as by the early death of their mutual friend Violet Shilitto. Violet was an unrequited love of Vivien’s who introduced her to Barney, and after her death, Vivien was wracked by guilt over a feeling of having neglected their friendship while in the throes of romance. Vivien left Barney and eventually wound up in the arms of another. Barney, normally the one being pursued by her various lovers, undertook a number of attempts at winning her back over the next couple of years, including hiring a professional opera singer to serenade her outside her window. The ongoing campaign did not, of course, prevent Barney from pursuing an array of other affairs at the same time.

Barney finally succeeded in getting through to Vivien through a series of elaborate ploys, which included composing and dedicating the poetry collection I Remember Her (and traveling across Europe to surprise her with it). The poems, which form a rough narrative discernible to those familiar with the two protagonists and their histories, stand beautifully on their own. In the earliest verses of the collection, full of reminiscence about the early days of Vivien and Barney’s romance, we find a beautiful testimony to lesbian love, certain to leave the reader swooning. The darker, more complex poems toward the middle of the collection—rooted in episodes of Barney’s personal history, as translator Suzanne Stroh explains—will appeal to the gothic reader of any persuasion. The collection ends on melancholic notes of passion and pathos.

While Barney was highly regarded by the intellectuals and literati of her era, she is not well remembered today. Despite not having achieved lasting fame as a writer, she certainly accomplished her stated goal of making her own life a poem. And she was integral to the literary scene of which she was a part, inspiring other writers through gifts of love and money alike. Yet her under-appreciated writing possesses its own beauty. Her autobiographical work can be sparse and to-the-point in the manner of the best memoir and reportage writers, but she also possesses an ability to turn out breathtaking lines of prose. Rather than try to turn these into poetry, she often preferred to publish them as collections of epigrams, a literary quality on display in many of the poems in this collection as well. The most moving poems are those depicting the early stages of two women falling in love.

The collection is invaluable as a contribution to the shockingly sparse collection of Barney’s writing in English translation, but it’s equally valuable for the extensive essay on Barney’s life appended to the collection by Stroh (the essay takes up about a third of the book’s 115 pages). Stroh surveys the existing English-language literature by and about Barney, and offers a beautiful précis of Barney’s early life, focusing primarily on her torrid, protracted and ultimately doomed relationship with Vivien. Vivien, wracked by illness in part due to her extensive drug and alcohol use, died in 1909 at the age of thirty-two. Stroh explores the complex twists and turns of their relationship, which is riveting in its own right. But far from serving merely as a lurid glimpse into Parisian sapphistry, the essay is also immensely helpful in unpacking the subtle meanings of the poetry.

I initially wondered why the explanatory text was not situated at the front of the book, so as to equip the reader with a deeper understanding of the context prior to reading the poems. But the more I thought about it, the more I approved of Stroh’s choice. Entering into the poem without too much biographical context forces the reader to experience and appreciate it on its own, savouring the construction of phrase and use of language, along with the delicate and erotic imagery, and without reading any deeper, more precise historical meaning into it. Sometimes the mind—as well as the heart—needs to encounter a poem on its own terms, to more fully lose oneself in the miasma of images and feelings it evokes. The historical essay then provides a gratifying digestif, cooling the reader’s passions in the wake of Barney’s heady, heartfelt prose. Stroh deserves immense credit for her dedication in bringing Barney’s life and work to the attention of a new generation.

150 years after her birth, more than fifty years after her death (she lived to the age of ninety-five, embarking on her final romantic liaison in her eighties with a woman nearly three decades younger), Barney continues to compel. What draws us to her? In her 1988 study of Barney and Vivien’s relationship and writing, The Amazon and the Page, Karla Jay wrote that “Barney and Vivien felt that their work had to be lived in order to be valid” and undoubtedly this interface of poetry with lived experience is one feature that elevated the seductive quality of their writing and wooed readers then as now. On a surface level, Barney appears to be the archetype of the original sapphic heartbreaker, drifting from one remarkable romance to another, transported atop a rich bed of early-twentieth-century poetry and art. Barney was a passionate and articulate champion of Sapphic life. She was more than a heartbreaker: she thought deeply and wrote about the nature of friendship and loyalty, both of which she valued and practiced exceedingly well. Those who merely see her as a wealthy, sexually adventurous patron of the arts miss her most important qualities as a writer, a thinker, a philosopher, and a theorist who did not merely write and appreciate poetry, but lived and breathed it in the truest sense. She was a modern woman decades ahead of her time; one who possessed all the troubling faults of any rich person (for instance an inability to see beyond her bubble of privilege), yet one who also carved a courageous and unapologetic path for contemporary queer lives. I Remember Her is an excellent starting point for those interested in studying this remarkable woman, a muse and an inspiration to generations of artists. Stroh’s translation and accompanying essay is a worthy and overdue tribute for this Amazon of love and letters.

Rhea Rollmann is an award-winning journalist, writer, and audio producer based in Canada. She’s the author of A Queer History of Newfoundland (Engen Books, 2023) and has an extensive background in queer, trans, and labour activism.

First Love: Essays on Friendship
Lilly Dancyger
The Dial Press, 2024, 224 pages
$30.00

Reviewed by Leslie Lopez

“To nurture and care for another person, to provide them with tenderness and emotional shelter from the world that mostly doesn’t give a shit about them. To love so fiercely and with such unrestraint that the recipient of that love feels sustained by it, and never feels fully alone in the world. This is what my closest friends give to me, and what I try to give to them” (138).

Lilly Dancyger’s First Love: Essays on Friendship is an honoring of female friendship and the ways these relationships become early sites of platonic intimacy.

Dancyger opens this collection by sharing that her cousin, Sabina, was her first love. From being children who created new words to describe their love for each other to spending time together at different points in their adolescence, each anecdote shows the connection between them remaining strong despite the physical distance and circumstances of life. It’s not a surprise that Dancyger comes to see friendship as synonymous with vulnerability, deep love, and belonging.

But First Love is also about grief. When Sabina is brutally murdered a few weeks shy of her twenty-first birthday, it’s the powerful friendships Dancyger has cultivated that keep her treading above water. These relationships are the basis for the fifteen essays, each one providing an additional cultural layer or personal memory that moves the collection along.

In “The Fire Escape,” Dancyger recounts living with her friend in a crammed East Village apartment. She goes on to describe how the rusted metal perch outside their kitchen window became a space for the friends to connect over cigarettes and alcohol, even after Sabina’s death. She goes on to say of her friends, “Not one of them tried to persuade me to come inside, and for that I loved them more than ever” (108). Thus, the fire escape provided Dancyger the freedom to grieve, exist, and be cared for in a time of tremendous pain.

Dancyger’s writing about friendship also includes a discussion of her fractured relationship with her mother and her indecision about becoming a parent. In “Mutual Mothering,” she shares, “What I do know is that when I imagine what kind of mother I would be, it’s the kind of friend I’ve been that allows me to see it clearly, and to believe I’d do it well” (161). It’s this honesty and unabashed importance of platonic relationships that feels refreshing, especially in a culture that puts romantic relationships on a pedestal and sells the narrative that traditional family is the only real source of care.

Reading First Love served as a reminder that grief can also be an exploration of what it means to have loved, been loved, and continue loving in a world as simultaneously scary and joyous as ours.

Leslie Lopez (she/they) is a Dallas-born, Chicago-based writer pursuing a Master’s of Science in Library and Information Science from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She can often be found crocheting (badly), laughing (loudly), and reviewing books on her Instagram, @anotherlesbrarian.

Mega Milk: Essays on Family, Fluidity, Whiteness, and Cows
Megan Milks
Feminist Press, 2026, 336 pages
$17.95

Reviewed by [sarah] Cavar

Milk: It’s everywhere, in everything (12). So says Megan Milks in Mega Milk, a wide-ranging reflection on race, gender, size, species, and milk, a secretion that looms large in the U.S. corporate-cultural zeitgeist. Milk has undergone something of a transition in the decades since Milks’s childhood, shifting shape from a hallmark of the healthy, all-American, and notably white diet, into something of a commercial downward spiral, blame for which has been attributed to anything from Gen Z, to veganism, to allergies. With this fluidity in mind, Milks is invested in the “trans potentiality of milk” (28), the capacity of the fluid to shift shape and meaning not only in rhetoric, but in the bodyminds of those who produce, exchange, and consume it.

In approaching milk’s trans potentiality, Milks begins with what might be understood as the cis potential of milk, detailing the lives of cows subjected to abusive breeding and milking regimes, either as incubators or as inseminators. For Milks, the lived experience of cows is entangled both with life-giving (sustenance for their late cat, Claude) and life-taking (the premature killing of those cows that have outlived their “production value” [86] as well as the suffering of migrant workers, including children, forced to work on these farms). Likewise, they acknowledge that, as a formula-fed baby, cows have been something of a “foster mother” (132) to them—coming into uncomfortable proximity with the racialized and classed position of prior centuries’ wet nurses.

The trans potentiality of milk also emerges in its crossings from word, to name, to material necessity. “Milk,” as a word, summons “cow,” a term appended to fat, feminized people, Milks’s child-self included. Milk, and its absence, becomes symbolic of Milks’s disordered eating. Additionally, the material attachment of milk to the breast—and, by extension, to femininity, motherhood, and the concept of femaleness itself—is rich territory for trans exploration: in “The Letdown: Lactation Suite,” Milks historicizes their relationship to a body coercively assigned female at birth; the complexities of binding, intimacy, and self-knowledge; and to the expectations and demands placed upon nursing parents.

Much like the contradictory expectations placed upon trans people—both to transition “fully” for legitimacy’s sake, and not to transition at all—nursing parents (understood as “mothers”) face dual pressure to embrace the “naturalness” of the breast and to embrace the science of formula so as to preserve their looks and properly nourish their children. This places people of marginalized genders, whether nursing or not, into what Milks correctly puns a “double-bind”: there is no way to fully satisfy a cisheteropatriarchal system in its insatiable hunger for subjugation across species, gender, and positionality.

Race, too, is implicated in the commercial and symbolic impacts of milk, particularly for the U.S. In the essay “MAGA Milk,” Milks quotes a speech by then-Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover in 1923: “Upon this industry, more than any other of the food industries, depends not alone the problem of public health, but there depend upon it the very growth and virility of the white race” (172). Indeed, the racialization of milk—not to mention its embeddedness in systems of white, christian supremacy—extend further back than U.S. empire: in Medieval and Renaissance Europe, breastmilk was understood as excess menstrual blood, saved and transmuted in order to feed newborn babies. “Bad milk,” including milk contaminated by unsanitary dairy practices, was an affront not only to a baby’s health but to its selfhood, a kind of ontological contamination informed by racist, classist ideologies. Later, after a cultural flip spurred on by the American eugenics movement, healthy, “pure” milk became a hallmark of the fit family—once again, milk consumption (albeit of a different kind) was a prerequisite for purity, goodness, and normality.

It is no surprise, then, that Milks’s best moments in this collection are moments of profound impurity—moments where their thoughts cross from human to nonhuman, diluting the myths of fitness and purity the image of milk now offers. Milks, in escaping themself, escapes the inevitable inadequacies of anthropocentric interpretation when attempting to approach nonhuman ways of knowing. In the startling essay “Milking the Bull,” Milks decides to inseminate themself with the sperm of a bull, and in so doing, internalizes and ultimately reproduces his story in a queer, literary (re)birth. The latter pages of the essay are devoted not to Milks’s experiences, but the bull’s, and the reader follows the narrative to his life’s inevitable end. This essay—perhaps the most uncomfortable in the entire collection—is a highlight, both for its taboo subject matter and for the empathy and intentionality of its portrayal. In this moment, more than any other, Milks sits in the crevice between their body and another’s, and asks what it means to cross that boundary, to trans it, together.

As a constellation of essays on milk’s many meanings and potentialities, Mega Milk is deeply, powerfully uncomfortable. At times, I felt impatient with the text, eager to move from moments of observation and reflection to critical analysis, particularly regarding the nonhuman animals on whose bodily fluids the book relies. Particularly in moments where milk is present but its nonhuman producers, notably, are absent (such as in “Tres Leches”), it feels as though cows are a specter haunting a story that tries to be about something else—about gender, about economics, about family, about identity. While touching on the ethical and environmental urgency of critique, Mega Milk is persistently reflective in a way I did not expect, and struggle to collect my feelings about.

At the same time, Milks anticipates my critique, meets it before it escapes my mouth, or my hands, onto the page. “No, it’s personal essays,” they explain to a Hindu physical therapist, who asks if the collection is “making a case against dairy” (265). In a roundabout way, Milks has, throughout the course of the text, called out some of my own bona fides: whiteness and rurality of upbringing, transness and chosen distance from the “femaleness” yoked to us from birth, experiences of restrictive, disorderly eating. Then there is veganism, part of my life for twelve of my twenty-seven years, and the attendant expectations that this collection do the polemic work that it neither claims nor seeks to do. This is a trans book, a queer book, a book about openings and potentialities. There exist dozens of polemics describing accurately and in detail the evils of industrial animal agriculture, not to mention the white supremacist nationalisms embedded in American food production and distribution. So I let the text rest, took time to think. Let my thoughts gestate, squeeze out what remains. And at that ending is how I begin this review.

[sarah] Cavar is the author of Failure to Comply (featherproof books, 2024) and Differential Diagnosis (Northwestern University Press, 2026). They hold a PhD in Cultural Studies and Science & Technology Studies from the University of California, Davis, and can be found online at www.cavar.club, @cavar on bluesky, and at librarycard.beehiiv.com.

Sex Beyond “Yes”: Pleasure and Agency for Everyone
Quill R. Kukla
W. W. Norton & Company, 2025, 176 pages
$24.00

Reviewed by Allison Quinlan

“We need to talk to one another in order to explore what we want to do and how to do it well together.”

Kukla provides readers with vignettes of sexual encounters and breaks down the philosophical questions that arise surrounding pleasure, ethics, and desire in these encounters. As stated in the title, their examples do aim to include everyone: readers see queer stories, stories with older people, individuals with disabilities, neurodivergence, Black and brown individuals, and generally an avoidance of white, able-bodied, cishet stories. I appreciated this, as oftentimes material on sexuality can operate on assumptions of cisgenderness, heterosexuality, whiteness, and no disability. It’s important for a book/guide on good sex to actually be applicable.

The work acknowledges that discussions of sex often center on consent and how to prevent bad sex. Kukla makes clear, “This is a book about good sex. I want to explore how we can expand and protect our own and one another’s sexual agency and pleasure, and enjoy wanted, satisfying, ethically sound sex.” They explain that human flourishing necessitates opportunities to access and exercise sexual pleasure and agency, both safely and ethically. If our only understanding of sex rests on a yes/no binary, a binary of simply avoiding harm rather than exploring pleasure, we can miss the conversations, cues, invitations, curiosity, and mutual building that sexual relationships need to move into those safe and ethical experiences.

This is not to say the author rejects consent or the importance of avoiding harm; consent is defined at the outset and upheld as necessary at all times. A recurring concept in the work is “scaffolding,” which can be cultural, social, or interpersonal. The idea is that structures and systems will be set up to safeguard and reinforce autonomy. Examples include negotiations of safe words in advance (interpersonal) or having good sex education and access to contraceptives (social). Kukla writes, “Much of good sexual communication is not about asking questions or giving answers at all: We should be building fantasies together, flirting, expressing our concern and affection for one another, and establishing trust.”

I appreciated their efforts for practical guidance, and I enjoyed the work. I personally feel it needed more detail in the areas Kukla let us know were challenging, but the author still did a good job of engaging. My feelings may just be my own internal conflicts with ideas of consent and power.

You can watch an event Lighthouse Bookshop facilitated for the author online for free here!

Allison Quinlan is a PhD student in Scotland.

In the Dream House
Carmen Maria Machado
Graywolf Press, 2019, 272 pages
$26.00

Reviewed by Allison Quinlan

Content Warning: Abuse

My first encounter with Machado’s In the Dream House was when I worked in domestic abuse services and research. One of the women I was speaking to described what she had survived and asked if I had read Machado’s work; she shared a segment from the book to describe her experiences. The book gave her the words to describe what happened and what she needed to help her healing process, and I remember thinking, “This is something I should read.” This story is non-fiction. This narrative is Machado’s lived reality. Her recount is powerful, both in its content and in its presentation. She splits the narrative between ‘I’ and ‘You’ (‘I’ being the author now and ‘You’ being the author during the abuse). Suddenly, you’re reading about emotions and situations that ‘you’ experience as a victim-survivor, and empathy becomes ingrained.

She avoids explicit details of the abuse, but is clear about her survival of sexual, physical, emotional, and psychological violence. The woman in the dream house (the abuser) can be both exceptionally ‘loving’ and, the next instant, violent and terrifying. This duality mirrors the complicated realities of intimate partner violence (IPV): the person you love isn’t always bad all the time; it can be hard to realise a situation is abusive when you’re being love-bombed between the violence. Machado is clear—having survived and writing this from the perspective of someone who escaped—that no matter how ‘good’ an abuser can seem at times, it never excuses their abuse.

Lesbian IPV often goes unrecognised by both support services and survivors themselves, in part due to misalignment with heteronormative scripts of abuse (cis male abuser/cis female victim: white, thin, physically abused). Machado writes, “Putting language to something for which you have no language is no easy feat” (156), and rightly explains how even within the queer community, gender rhetoric has been used as “a way of absolving queer women from responsibility for domestic abuse” (230). She shares the story of Debra Reid, a Black lesbian woman who killed her abuser in self-defence (see the Framingham Eight). Reid’s case was reframed as ‘mutual battering’ and her sentence was never commuted like those of all the other women in the Framingham Eight. Machado concludes, “Narratives about abuse in queer relationships—whether acutely violent or not—are tricky in this same way. . . Our culture does not have an investment in helping queer folks understand what their experiences mean” (161).

There is also the complexity of reporting abuse in the queer community: Machado reiterates concerns about reinforcing negative lesbian stereotypes by sharing her experiences. She writes about this complication, noting, “queer does not equal good or pure or right. It is simply a state of being—one subject to politics, to its own social forces, to larger narratives, to moral complexities of every kind” (51-52). When reflecting on the abuse, she muses on what she’d say to her abuser: “For fuck’s sake, stop making us [lesbians] look bad” (145). The reality is that abuse can exist in all relationships, and if we avoid speaking out about it, it continues to go unaddressed, unexplored, and leaves queer communities vulnerable.

Machado’s work is incredibly important, but readers should be aware that the content can be difficult at times. This difficulty doesn’t mean you shouldn’t engage, but I would encourage readers to make sure they have space to work through any issues that may arise while reading. If any of the content mirrors your relationship or experiences (current or past), or if something doesn’t feel right in your relationship, reach out to a number below. Contacting doesn’t mean you’re in an abusive relationship, but it never hurts to speak to someone about an experience you feel uncomfortable with. Your feelings and experiences are real and deserve respect, validation, and support. Your partner(s) should respect you and make you feel safe.

Help is available:
RAINN (US): 800 656 4673
Lada Nacional Gratuita (MX): 800 822 4460
Canada Crisis Lines
Galop (UK): 0800 999 5428
1800Respect (AUS): 1800 737 732
WAVE Helplines (EU): 116 016

Allison Quinlan is a former support service provider and current PhD student working with adult LGBTQ+ survivors of IPV in Scotland.

Trans Femme Futures: An Abolitionist Ethic for Transfeminist Worlds
Nat Raha and Mijke van der Drift
Pluto Press, 2024, 256 pages
$22.95

Reviewed by Allison Quinlan

I received a free copy of Trans Femme Futures in late 2024, shortly after For Women Scotland, funded in large part by famed TERF (trans-exclusionary radical feminist) Joanne K. Rowling, defeated the Scottish Government in the High Court, forcing them to define ‘woman’ based solely on ‘biology.’ Trans individuals were not consulted, did not testify, and were not considered when the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) issued guidance to practitioners following the decision. Effectively, rights were stripped from trans, nonbinary, intersex, and non-‘normative’ women across the country, including rights to support services following abuse, as well as the ECHR issuing toilet bans. Trans men were seemingly not targeted in the guidance, only trans women. So, Pluto Press offered Trans Femme Futures to help us understand how transfemme individuals are perceived socially and invited us to imagine a world where existence is not criminalised, erased, or constantly threatened.

From the start, Trans Femme Futures outlines the importance of rejecting ideas giving legitimacy solely to individuals who fit social ideas of transness—in their words, “a body that is legibly and visibly trans, in public or in private.” As they note throughout the work, multiple factors influence individuals’ presentations and how they are perceived based on race, ability and health, access to healthcare, size, and more. Breaking out of these assigned femme ideals is as much a method of active disruption as it is of creating an existence that is one’s own, rejecting conformity to yet another gendered expectation. Following the thread of self-expression outside assigned ideals, the work discusses assimilation and respectability politics regarding sexuality:

Like queer liberalism before it, the sanitised reframing of trans and non-binary folks might make some of us more respectable, but often at the expense of those of us who wear our sexualities upon our sleeves, or those of us who are objectified and hyper-sexualised (most often Black and Brown trans women and other trans people of colour).

After establishing the dynamics of heteronormative and cisnormative social interactions in conversation with transfemme lives, bodies, and spaces, the work moves on to the theme of community, which is present throughout the rest of the work. The authors explore the differences between a community (group members have something in common but don’t necessarily know everyone) and a collective (existence through direct relations), and how these can contribute to organising for a better future. However, they warn against experience-led organising creating an obligation to participate, and emphasise the importance of holding differences within organising spaces, noting that care should be mutual.

Across the chapters, the authors argue that trans liberation won’t be granted by the structures that currently oppress us, and they take an abolitionist, grassroots approach to building a future. Community and collective struggle stay at the core of their roadmap for trans femme futures:

Part of the work of overcoming oppressions, including internalised oppressions, entails countering the voices and affective economies that claim we are not worthy of support, while building the social infrastructures and worlds that can open the space to articulate one’s needs—in a way that is couched in consent.

Solidarity, which aims for total liberation, is the path forward. In a time when courts write trans erasure into policy, Trans Femme Futures insists we’re already forming a better future collectively. The work comes to a close, centering joy: “In the end, it’s all about the joy of living our lives and the pleasure of shaping them together.”

Allison Quinlan is a PhD student in Scotland and quite angry at people who continue to buy Harry Potter. At least learn to pirate!

Leaving Home at 83
Sandra Butler
Rattling Good Yarns Press, 2024, 178 pages
$18.95

Reviewed by Martha Miller

In this memoir, after a series of illnesses, Sandra Butler decides to leave home after fifty years and move to Phoenix to a residential home for seniors called Desert Manor, where she longs to have the details of her life taken care of. This is a funny but honest account of her adjustment period, where her desires are lined up against reality. For example, she wants to eat prepared meals in the dining room with other lodgers. But it doesn’t work out. She learns that the food isn’t that good, and the tables have assigned seats. She doesn’t fit in and is told as much, so she ends up buying food and eating in her apartment alone. One of her reasons for moving to Phoenix is that she will be close to her daughters. That doesn’t work out the way she thinks it will, either. She seldom sees her children.

Butler thought, “We have to have our paradise while we’re alive” (117) and hoped that Desert Manor would be one step toward it. However, she’d only seen pictures of her apartment before she moved, although she was offered a tour. When she enters the apartment, she finds pigeons have taken over her balcony. Then, when she has cleaned it, she has to block off the birds’ return with plastic wrap. So, there’s no sitting out there and enjoying the desert views.

Butler considers herself a lesbian activist, and even though she tries to be as open as possible, she doesn’t find a single person like her. Unexpectedly, she finds her way to the hearts of other residents through her Judaism. She asks residents about themselves and eventually wins them over as they tell their stories. It is only in the end, when she gets to talk about herself, that she can say she’s made some friends. Each friend she makes, she must do so by accepting their quirky personalities. She learns to live in an environment that she originally wanted to change. And in the end, she becomes satisfied with it.

At Desert Manor, Butler must confront her age more than ever. At one point, an Avon Lady comes, and she buys a bunch of makeup that renders her smooth and unidentifiable. Before the makeup, “My hair was thinning, my hips were thickening, my eyes were dimming, and my teeth appeared to be shifting. There was no cute part left anywhere on my body” (70). She quickly washes the stuff off her face and puts it away forever. She finds that she prefers the wrinkles and brown spots she’s developed over the years. “The primary identity here [Desert Manor] was old. Everything. . . collapsed into that” (113).

Along with the other residents, Butler feels sad that there’s no longer anyone who knows her history. One night at a dance, she discovers she can no longer dance through a whole record and determines to dance on her feet as long as she can and then dance from her seat. Accepting this, she says, “When I moved to Phoenix, I’d longed to have the details of my life taken care of, which they weren’t” (138), but she develops attainable new desires.

This is a well-written, humorous book. We find that while Butler must work to adjust to things at Desert Manor, she becomes friends with most residents, and they adjust to her. She is the leader of more than one Jewish group and works to include other residents. Meetings that were four or five people became more than thirty. We learn, as Butler learns, that she is more than a lesbian activist.

I felt the book started slowly while detailing her illnesses, but it was worth continuing. When she moved to her new home, the conflicts were interesting and often amusing. I wondered if young people would enjoy this book. There is no wild sex or walks on the beach. But I certainly enjoyed this short 178 pages, where I found truths about aging, things that I identified with, and things that had me worried. I am a few years short of 83, but suddenly that age doesn’t seem so scary to me.

Martha Miller is a retired English professor and a Midwestern writer whose books include fiction, creative nonfiction, anthologies, and mysteries. Her nine books were published by traditional, but small, women’s presses. She’s published several reviews, articles, and short stories and won several academic and literary awards. For more detailed information, her website is https://www.marthamiller.net/. Her Wikipedia page is here. She lives in ‘The Land of Lincoln’ with her wife, two unruly dogs, and two spoiled and sleepy cats.

Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife
Francesca Wade
Scribner, 2025, 480 pages
$31.00

Reviewed by Martha Miller

Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife is a book divided into two parts. The first is the life of Gertrude Stein when she came to Paris with her brother Leo, who was interested in art, and the beginnings of her art collection. What follows is twenty-some years of their lives through some of the greatest history of literature and two wars in Paris, as Stein meets and befriends Alice B. Toklas, falls out with Leo, and during World War II hides out with Toklas in a small French town—writing, living, and loving. The second part begins with Stein’s death and Toklas’ efforts to publish Stein’s prolific unpublished writings. Toklas worked with scholars and powers that be at Yale, where Stein’s papers had been donated, for twenty years as she aged and finally died. In an effort to save Stein’s papers, Toklas accidentally sent a scholar not only books, but notebooks containing hers and Stein’s personal lives. Thus Stein and Toklas’ personal life became public. An unpublished book titled Q.E.D. that contained the events of Stein’s first lesbian affair, before she met Toklas, a secret for which Toklas never quite forgave her, was published under another title. It’s hard to reduce Wade’s book, which is so rich in information, into the length of a review. While a great deal of An Afterlife is written in academic passages, in fact, it’s not a difficult read. There’s something about it that compels the reader forward.

When Stein died in 1946, the bulk of her writing was unpublished. Her work, Wade claims, was all her life “spurred by her scientific background” (3). Trained in medicine as a young woman in the US, this influence is clear later on in her writing. Stein asked questions about how perception worked, how words made meaning and embody the essence of people, places, things, and existence. She saw words as living things with physical properties, like materials a painter or sculptor might use to shape something new. Stein did with words what an artist does with paint.

Stein may be called less a writer in the conventional sense than a philosopher of language. As a woman with a wife, I liked the phrase, “My wife my life is my life is my wife,” (105). I admit that before reading Wade’s book, the most I knew about Stein was ‘a rose is a rose is a rose,’ which I discovered was so well known that Toklas had it embroidered on several objects in their home. I knew that Stein was an overweight lesbian who wrote in repetition and was often difficult to read. Her process was sleeping late and writing, and then Toklas typed up the writing the next day. She loved reading mysteries and often read one a day. In later years, during a trip to America, she wanted to meet Dashiell Hammett. One thing I think most know about her is she entertained visitors in her room with walls covered with paintings. The studio gatherings consisted of painters, modernist writers, and their wives. Stein entertained the artists and Toklas the wives. I actually started to wonder if Stein had not been an overweight, openly lesbian female, her writing might have been considered on a level of Joyce, Faulkner, and other experimental writers of the modernist or post-modernist era. The truth was, “Stein always made people uncomfortable” (375).

Stein’s second book, The Making of Americans was completed in 1912 when Stein was 38. It was a reparative classic immigrant narrative. New people make new existences out of old lives. Stein did not make a profit from her writing even though the women self-published five titles under the trade name of The Plain Editions between 1930 and 1933. She and Toklas financed the books by selling a Picasso. Whenever money was tight, they looked toward the many paintings in their studio. Nevertheless, Stein soon started to make a little money from The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas published in 1932, and an opera, Four Saints in Three Acts, for which she wrote the words and Vergil Thompson wrote the music. One very interesting part of Stein and Toklas’ life was World War II when, as two aging Jewish women, they left Paris and stayed in the country. Paris was invaded and eventually so was the small town where they hid. But they survived to return to Paris.

Gertrude Stein died on July 27, 1946 of uterine cancer, leaving Alice B. Toklas a widow for the next twenty years, with four hundred dollars a month and a mission. All property, including stocks, bonds, $82,000 cash, royalties, and the high-priced paintings from the studio, belonged to Stein’s nephew, whom neither woman was close to. Four hundred dollars a month in 1946 may have been adequate for living expenses, but as the next twenty years passed, the compensation paid for less and less. As time passed, Toklas frequently borrowed money from friends just to get by. After Stein’s death, only two books made money. The first was Q.E.D., the second was We Eat: A Cook Book, by Alice B. Toklas and Gertrude Stein, which Stein wrote most of. These royalties went to Stein’s nephew.

Scholars who worked with Stein’s writing discovered that it changed over the years; in the beginning she used syntax to explore the inner process of emotions, and later she used language from literary conventions to explore her own feelings. With Q.E.D., Toklas pondered the final success of Patricia Highsmith’s The Price of Salt which after several rejections she finally published in pulp. Q.E.D. was published and a success. Toklas never abandoned her mission to get the rest of Stein’s writing published. Thanks to her, more of Stein’s writing was published after her death than before.

While the beginning of the book was an exciting love story, this later part was sad, as Toklas’ health went downhill. She died March 7, 1967 and was buried in the same grave as Gertrude Stein. Here the story is well written and interesting, and is also heartbreaking, for as Toklas became old and ill, much of her life was told from the point of view of scholars and publishers who worked with Toklas and watched her struggle.

Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife is full of pictures and illustrations that support the story. I found this a well-written and easy-to-read book about a well-known modernist literary figure and a better-known early-twentieth-century lesbian couple. Their devotion to art and literature as well as to each other is remarkable.

Martha Miller is a retired English professor and a Midwestern writer whose books include fiction, creative nonfiction, anthologies, and mysteries. Her nine books were published by traditional, but small, women’s presses. She’s published several reviews, articles, and short stories and won several academic and literary awards. Her website is https://www.marthamiller.net/. Her Wikipedia page is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martha_Miller_(author).

Fragments of Wasted Devotion
Mia Arias Tsang, illustrated by Levi Wells
Quilted Press, 2025, 144 pages
$16.00

Reviewed by Allison Quinlan

Fragments of Wasted Devotion is an incredibly self-descriptive title. Before reading, I assumed it was the poetic, hooking title that so many collections use (and then vaguely connect to one piece in the work), but no, this is simply a collection of Tsang’s fragments of wasted devotions. She sets the reader up to know the story won’t end well: “My heart was too young to be settled,” and she proceeds to become devoted anyway: “but I laid it down on your chest anyway” (1). From the first line, she presents the reader with the question: What does one do with unrequited devotion?

The ‘fragments’ aspect of the title rings true as well. Each work tosses you into a story with little to no context, and you certainly won’t find out the conclusion here, either. Readers see a fragmented narrative where the only throughline you can grasp is the devotion, again and again, no matter the person, place, or time. I struggled with this a bit, but I think that’s because I personally wrestle with more poetic vignettes like this work, not due to any flaw in the book. However, given that the fragments of Tsang’s wasted devotions are the heart of this collection, I found this fragmented presentation of vignettes clever and intriguing.

I deeply appreciated the honesty in her writing. Who hasn’t wondered how to hold someone in their heart if they can’t “eat my groceries before they rot?” (8). You don’t have to have your whole life together to love someone deeply. Tsang also dips into the complicated truth of loving someone who has hurt you (I’m also a firm believer in holding love and anger in your heart at the same time). “Melatonin Dreams” is a three-part piece where Tsang describes the pain of recurring dreams about her partner; a house in New Haven that’s long, brown, and green “like a shotgun. . . I’m ready for you to blow my head off again” (34) and then writes, “I am still trying to protect you from the rage of everyone who wants me to be happy” (35). Don’t we all know it—you have long conversations with family and friends, tearing apart someone for how they treated you, but you have that inexplicable urge to defend them (not their actions necessarily, just them). It can feel hard to hate someone you’ve seen humanity in, no matter how they left you. She finishes, “It’s hell to be trapped behind my own eyes, letting you happen to me when I’m supposed to have control here” (38).

How much these experiences are actually in Tsang’s control, I’m not sure. She writes, “I am on edge and I am breaking my life to get to you because that is what I do for what I love” (42), and she buys the bus ticket, crossing cities to reach someone one hundred and forty-three point three miles away. And again, she writes that the people she loves ask, in horror, “Why do you keep doing this to yourself?” (44). But Tsang answers her own questions, and mine, and those of the people who love her, when she writes, “I touch the feral creature of my heart and ask is there anything left to give and it howls yes yes yes forever” (42). “Longing Distance” was my favourite section of the collection because it replicates a feeling I think many of us have experienced, to some degree, of putting the world on hold to get to someone we love who doesn’t necessarily return the effort. “I shouldn’t have had to beg,” she writes, “I wish I could want anything else” (67–68).

So what does one do with unrequited devotion? The reader is welcome to find their own answer. Tsang, for her part, “fade[s] to black with a heart bursting with all the love you wouldn’t take and I know I’ll forgive you anything” (111).

Lastly, on page 15, there is an illustration of a little creature with a face like this: (•⤙•), and I love it. I didn’t write about all the illustrations, but every one was absolutely gorgeous, full of whimsy, and engaging.

Allison Quinlan is a PhD student in Scotland and might be the world’s slowest writer.

All the Way to the River: Love, Loss, and Liberation
Elizabeth Gilbert
Riverhead Books, 2025, 400 pages
$35.00

Reviewed by Cassandra Langer

Elizabeth Gilbert, global sweetheart of women’s magazines, TED Talks royalty, and patron saint of anyone who ever wanted to eat their way around the world, has returned with a new memoir. This one is not about finding love in Bali or mastering yoga in an Indian ashram. No, All the Way to the River is Gilbert’s full-throttle plunge into grief, queerness, addiction, mystical visitations, and the kind of emotional mayhem most of us would only confess under anesthesia.

This is not a beach read. It’s a fasten-your-seatbelts-for-a-bumpy-ride-and-maybe-book-an-appointment-with-your-therapist-after-you-finish book.

Gilbert begins with a visitation from her late partner, Rayya Elias, whose spirit seems far too opinionated to stay politely deceased. People may roll their eyes at such things, but I’m not one of them.

After my beloved dog died, I returned home to an apartment so empty it echoed. I clutched her leash like a Victorian widow and wept into her water bowl. The next morning, a disgusting, toilet-water-soaked tennis ball—yes, that one, the one I threw out—appeared on my pillow. I didn’t scream. I thought, “Oh. So that’s how it’s going to be.”

So when Gilbert talks about Rayya dropping in from the great beyond, I’m right there with her. Some of us get messages from the dead. Some get comfort. Some get ghostly tennis balls.

Gilbert’s memoir is a wild mosaic, equal parts emotional demolition derby, spiritual travelogue, queer romance, and New Age interpretive dance. At moments, it feels like The Killing of Sister George wandered off, took mushrooms, and started reading Jean Genet.

She tells us right away: “I couldn’t believe I had sunk this low.” And to her credit, she means it every time. Gilbert dives from one high to the next: emotional, spiritual, narcotic, romantic. It’s like watching a very literary pinball machine: bing, new obsession. Bong, new crisis. Ding, new mystical revelation.

And somehow it’s both maddening and completely relatable. Who hasn’t, in a moment of loneliness, reached for something questionable? Maybe not a controlled substance or a penthouse rental, but we’ve all been there in spirit.

At the heart of the book is Gilbert’s care for Rayya as she dies from pancreatic and liver cancer, a journey as tender as it is terrifying. Gilbert is loving, terrified, overwhelmed, generous, impulsive, broke, extravagant, sober, not sober, heartbroken, hopeful, and hysterically human. Sometimes all in the same paragraph.

Eventually, she lands in a twelve-step program, declaring that after contemplating murder, suicide, or possibly both on alternate Thursdays, it was time to “ask for help.” A sensible conclusion, really.

She writes with naked honesty, sometimes too naked, the way someone overshares in a group therapy session, and you suddenly find yourself rooting for them against your will.

This memoir is not for everyone, especially not for highly critical readers, but co-dependent lesbians will lap it up. It is for:

● people who fall in love like they’re leaping off cliffs
● people who grieve like the world is ending (because it is, for them)
● people who can’t resist one more emotional thrill ride
● people who have ever seen a sign from the dead and want a near-death experience

Others may find the book unbearable, too intense, too mystical, or too steeped in the spiritual equivalent of rainbow smoothies.

But Gilbert herself? She is a tangled, addictive, self-aware mess. And she knows it.

All the Way to the River is not tidy or transcendent in the way Gilbert’s earlier memoirs were. But it is deeply human, fiercely loving, unintentionally funny at times, and full of the chaos that happens when you’re trying to hold on to the living while being haunted—spiritually, emotionally, sometimes literally—by the dead.

By the last page, you may still not understand Elizabeth Gilbert, but you will absolutely appreciate her.

After all, most of us are just one heartbreak, one impulse purchase, or one ghostly tennis ball away from the river ourselves.

Cassandra Langer lives in Jackson Heights, New York, where she writes and reviews books, and makes art under the watchful eye of a very demanding calico. She is a contributor to The Gay & Lesbian Review, Ms. Magazine, Sinister Wisdom, and is the author of Romaine Brooks: A Life. She is currently completing her second volume of a two-book anti-conversion memoir, consisting of Erase Her: A Survivor’s Story (available at Amazon in Kindle and soft cover) and working on The Other Side Of The Rainbow: Growing Through Trauma. https://theothersideoftherainbow.org/