Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly
Formidable intelligence mixed with personal confusion is often a recipe for interesting reading. Clausen begins her story by stating that, after "a dozen years of intense coupledom" with a woman, she "got involved with a man." This book is both a personal "effort at mending a broken identity" and a more general attempt to describe human sexuality as fluid rather than fixed. Clausen recalls her essentially untroubled 1950s Pacific Northwest childhood. Her first sexual experience with a woman came freighted with her "political commitments" as a feminist and "growing reputation as a poet and novelist," and she freely admits that, as part of the feminist generation that came of age in the 1970s, she "hitched eros to ideology." She seems, however, unaware that, when she broke with the lesbian community after falling in love with a black male attorney on a trip to Nicaragua, she continued to link her sexuality to her politics. For example, she sees the search for bisexual and for biracial identities as similar in kind and refers to herself as "a tragic mulatto of sex." Her prose, while often stunning, carries a defensive tone as she jumps through logical hoops to retain her leftist and feminist bona fides. But her depictions of life in America in the '50s, the activism of college students in the '60s and the development of lesbian feminism in the '70s is fully engaging. And she comes by her confusion honestly, through an earnest, literate wrestling with the intersection of the personal and the political. QPB selection; author tour. (Mar.)
Library Journal
A feminist novelist and poet, Clausen (Beyond Gay or Straight: Understanding Sexual Orientation, Houghton, 1997) relates her challenging quest for an identity independent of her family, friends, lovers, and community in this well-written memoir. Having come out as a lesbian in the 1970s, Clausen candidly describes her growing disenchantment with the lesbian community and her increasingly rocky relationship with her longtime partner. In the middle of escalating tensions with community and home, she unexpectedly falls in love with a black male lawyer for whom she eventually leaves her female lover. Clausen, who since childhood has been living uncomfortably with society's ideas about what it means to be feminine or masculine, gay or straight, takes the courageous step of rejecting all of these labels in order to be a "floating woman," a woman unrestricted by the names, roles, or expectations placed on her by society. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 9/15/98.]--Kimberly L. Clarke, Univ. of Minnesota Lib., Minneapolis
Women's Review of Books
It's heartening to see a book that's both intimate and political in its insistence that sexuality is no more either/or than race, nationality, vocation, or any other sliver of our multiplicitous selves.
Kirkus Reviews
A tedious trek through private sexual yearnings, and a deft discussion of the politics of sexual identity. Poet and novelist Clausen (Sinking, Stealing, 1985; The Prosperine Papers, 1988) was cast out of the lesbian community, where she'd been immersed for nearly15 years, when she "got involved with a man." Nearly a decade later, she remains with the same man, continuing to puzzle over the personal complexities that saw her switch from heterosexual to homosexual and back. She bemoans the sexual "border police" who enforce rigid sexual categories. To this liberationist, even the label "bisexual" implies sexual confusion more than it does the broad spectrum of erotic attraction of which Clausen feels women (and perhaps men) are capable. Casting her arguments in the light of her own history, Clausen recounts her early affairs with men and brief encounters with women. She didn't commit herself to women until she moved from Oregon to New York City (with a man) and devoted herself to a lesbian feminist community that encouraged her writing. That dedication led to a 12-year relationship with a woman whose daughter they raised together. It was this "marriage" that she abandoned to live with a man. The rejection that followed wasn't the first time she'd been shunned by her lesbian cohorts-an earlier accusation of anti-Semitism had also caused a chill among her formerly close and influential colleagues. Today, reconciled somewhat with her lesbian associates, she's still regarded by many as a "former lesbian"-a niche she finds discomfiting. This well-reasoned plea to relax the boundaries between straight and gay (boundaries patrolled on both sides of the sexual fence) is weighed down by a personalhistory that's curiously mundane in the telling. (Author tour) .
