Fiction

Suicide Blonde

Name: Suicide Blonde
Author: Darcey Steinke
ISBN: 9780802193216

by Darcey Steinke

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Overview

A tour-de-force from one of the most daring and sensuous young writers in America, Suicide Blonde is the intensely erotic story of a young woman’s sexual and psychological odyssey, which Vanity Fair has called “a provocative tour through the dark side.” Jesse, a beautiful twenty-nine-year-old, is adrift in San Francisco’s demimonde of sexually ambiguous, drug-taking outsiders, desperately trying to sustain a connection with her bisexual boyfriend Bell. She becomes caretaker and confidante to Madame Pig, a grotesque, besotted recluse. Jesse also meets Madison, Pig’s daughter or lover or both, who uses others’ desires for her own purposes, and who leads Jesse into a world beyond all boundaries. A sensational novel published in nine languages, Suicide Blonde is a startling, knowing expurgation of identity and time, as well as the common, and now tainted, language of sexuality.

Set in the gritty world of San Francisco's Tenderloin District, this provocative novel by the author of Up Through the Water follows 29-year-old Jesse, as she struggles to connect with Bell, her troubled boyfriend. But Bell yearns for another love--a man named Kevin--and he mysteriously disappears into the bizarre netherworld of the city's seedy gay bars.

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Editorials

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

The author of Up Through the Water evokes sordid, neon-lit San Francisco nights in her brooding, explicit new novel of sexual degradation and futility. The story opens as narrator Jesse, shunned by her aloof lover Bell, bleaches her hair in a pathetic effort to impress him. ``I have always been attracted to people who make me feel inadequate,'' Jesse admits, and Bell--who frequently leaves her for homosexual liaisons and craves a former male lover--is a perfect example. But he needs her, too, to provide his false link to conventional heterosexuality. Jesse manages to leave Bell, but continues to welcome abuse; she descends into the nocturnal world of heroin addict Madison, an icy, cruel woman who derives her strength from punishing the weak. Every conversation here constitutes a power struggle; every statement brings revelation. Jesse's relentless introspection, raw emotions and indulgence in meaningless sexual encounters may put off some readers. Nevertheless, Steinke reveals many hard-to-accept truths about sentimental love, self-delusion and obsession as she strips each character of dignity. Author tour. (Sept.)

Donna Seaman

Steinke, author of a well-received first novel, "Up through the Water" , has a diabolical grasp of the willfulness of decadence, the ambiguity of sexuality, and the transmutability of identity. Her second novel is a grim, sordid yet electrifying tale with the ambience of a Warhol or John Waters film. Jesse is a depressed and fractured bottle blonde in love with an even more depressed bisexual actor named Bell. Her only friend is a gigantic boozy lesbian named Pig who sends her out into San Francisco's sleazy Tenderloin district to look for her ex-lover, a stripper/whore named Madison. Jesse is dangerously malleable, drawn to tormented, self-destructive types who somehow make her feel inadequate. Traumatized by her parents' divorce and determined to be bad, she describes herself as "the worst kind of person, attractive, overeducated, raised with middle class delusions of grandeur." Unable to keep Bell away from men and infatuated with Madison, Jesse cruises gay bars, sex clubs, and opium dens, selling her body and battering her soul. But somehow she's immune, merely a slumming tourist in a diseased world that destroys its genuine inhabitants. Edgy and powerful stuff.