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Underground > Books, Criticism & Writing >

Lesbian coming-of-age/coming out stories

15:50 / 11.04.09

My friend from work is looking for some books and stories that explore/are centred around coming out in their late teens. She's a gay 22 year old woman who came out about 4 years ago and she's gone a bit gaga over Lily Loveless' character arc in Skins, so she wants to read about that kind of thing. Any recommendations appreciated.

12:50 / 24.05.09

Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson perhaps?

13:09 / 24.05.09

Rita Mae Brown's Rubyfruit Jungle might work. It's got some historic oomph to it, is quite readable, funny, and is part of the half of Brown's literary output that isn't cat mystery.

There's something a bit tragically understated about the author's relationship with Zaza in Simone de Beauvoir's Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, that make it read not as a coming out, but as an avoiding admitting something. Or, detailing it, anyway.

05:46 / 27.05.09

Fucking love, love Michelle Tea's Passionate Mistakes and Intimate Corruptions of One Girl In America, and also Chelsea Girl, which covers some of the same period (both memoirs, and form a quasi trilogy with Valencia, the latter being my favourite of the three). Her first fiction novel, Rose Of No Man's Land, is also really good in the same area.

Also gotta recommend Ariel Schrag's comic memoirs - Awkward and Definition, Potential, and Likewise. She wrote and self-published these at the end of each year of high school and they are AMAZING not only in candid revelation and humour and craft but HOW THE FUCK she had to self-confidence to publish such intimate stuff at such a traditionally self-conscious age.