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The reason it’s never just once is the same reason money’s only a part of it. Most anyone can take or leave that, though they don’t think they can. The cover story of all time, that’s what money is. The excuse of excuses no one will question because they so much need to use it themselves.
Published by Doubleday in 1994, Heather Lewis’s chilling debut novel took place on the northeastern equestrian show-riding circuit, to which Lewis herself belonged in her teens. Expelled from boarding school, its fifteen-year-old narrator moves numbly through a world of motel rooms, heroin, dyke love, and doped horses. Kirkus Reviews found it “brutal, sensual, honest, seductive … a powerful debut,” while the New York Times found the book “grating and troublesome … it’s difficult to imagine a more passive specimen.”
Almost immediately, Lewis began writing Notice, a novel that moves even further into dark territory. The teenaged narrator Nina begins turning tricks in the parking lot of the train station near the Westchester County home of her absent parents. She soon falls into a sadomasochistic relationship with a couple. Arrested, she’s saved by a counselor and admitted to a psychiatric facility. But these soft forms of control turn out to be even worse. Writing in the register of an emotional fugue state, Notice’s helpless but all-knowing narrator is as smooth and sharp as a knife.
Rejected by every publisher who read it during Lewis’s life, Notice was eventually published by Serpent’s Tail in 2004, two years after her death. The book, long out of print, emerged as a classic queer text of trauma, written by one of the most talented novelists of her generation.
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
March 26, 2024 -
Formats
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Kindle Book
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OverDrive Read
- ISBN: 9781635902051
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EPUB ebook
- ISBN: 9781635902051
- File size: 351 KB
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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July 19, 2004
Lewis's third and final novel, published posthumously, is as dark and gritty as her 1994 debut, House Rules
. Anonymous sex, drug use and abusive relationships abound in the story of a young prostitute whose real name readers never learn as she operates in a haze of alcohol and drugs, drifting through a series of encounters whose patterns she fails to recognize. Teenaged Nina, as she prefers to be called "in these situations," turns tricks in the parking lot of a train station before going home to her absent parents' house. A relationship with a sadomasochistic client, Gabriel, and his wife, Ingrid, eventually leads to Nina's arrest and committal to a psych ward, where she meets Beth, a sympathetic counselor. But the systems designed, in theory, to save Nina do her the most damage, as the police, the guards and Beth all forge sexual relationships with her. Her only escape is back into a world in which Gabriel's malevolent influence and Ingrid's need are unavoidable. Lewis's language is stripped to the bone, with fragmented sentences and an adolescent's vocabulary making this a chilling first-person account of an emotionally anesthetized girl compelled to continue her self-destruction. Searing, graphic and not for the faint of heart, Lewis's novel is a punch to the gut readers will feel long after the shock of its impact has subsided.
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