Dykette: A Novel

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It was thankless work. Sasha grunted in frustration each time another terrible photo appeared in her camera roll. But she contorted anew, refocused the phone on her face (now visibly strained with determination), and humbled herself before the technology of the day—which everyone else used for purposes mundane and mercenary, but which Sasha was using for the highest purpose: that of seduction. The Grinch filter jumped to life in holographic patches. stars because I plowed through more than half in an evening just to find out what the hell was even happening. There was so much detail for such meaningless things and it dragged on and on (I don't care about every detail of each characters' outfit and what brands they are wearing, etc). I almost DNF because it was so bizarre and arbitrary but there was just enough curiosity in me that wanted to find out what the point of all of it was. But male authors do autofiction all the time and no one says a word. This is not my problem with the book, though it sometimes read like the internal argument one has with their imaginary enemy. It often read like practice for a conversation the author would like to have in person, or a rebuttal forgotten in the heat of the moment. In the beginning, of the three couples at the vacation farmhouse. Sasha and Jesse are the most defined and fleshed out. Early in the novel, other than evidence of their strident posture, we don't know much about who Jules and Miranda are. The games these people play with each other are weird, but not impossible to imagine, until it escalates into painfully absurd territory.

This is a book full of queer vocabulary and gossip written in a bold, unapologetic way. And why should it be otherwise? With Dykette, Davis has filled what has been mostly an empty shelf in the literary world.” Lou seems the most comfortable with themselves, and Jules is the most pretentious, like she always has to try too hard. A] biting tale of two young queer couples who go upstate with an older lesbian couple...plenty to cringe and laugh at.” Dykette is full of Sasha thinking about other texts, movies, books. What media was on your mind as you wrote the novel ?

Another thing I was really interested in was the extent to which other people will always be opaque to us, like maybe we can clear away certain things and maybe people come out in their full, naked desires, but how even the expression of those things can feel really superficial. I guess a big dynamic is exploring how can people be at once absolutely performative and absolutely sincere at the same time?

Sasha is, if you've read the author's prior work, pretty obviously a self-insert. Same dog, same opinions, same behavior by her own admission. There are other characters who are also avatars. Sasha's primary rival, Darcy, is unmistakably a spin on a certain Brooklyn it-girl. Jules is nakedly Rachel Maddow. In the queer world, where language, concepts, and terms describing sexuality and gender are both supremely important and constantly in flux, new additions to the lexicon are lapped up feverishly. Davis’s Dykette reads like a taxonomy of queer theory, references, and history, while offering up wholly new words and takes on contemporary lesbian life. Chief among them is the eponymous dykette, which Davis describes as “a dyke with frills and bows and ruffles. An accessorized, aestheticized, decorated dyke. The most extreme, exaggerated version of a femme. So exaggerated that it kind of perverts itself and becomes weird.” Let's get this out of the way: I am not queer enough and too middle aged to enjoy this book. 6 lesbians vacationing together in an upstate house between Christmas and New Years sounded like a great setup for character study and exploration of the dynamic between them. In reality this book assumes that you already has a good understanding of the butch/femme dynamics and a lesbian scene and immediately dives into details that for a beginner LGBTQIA+ reader like me were definitely over my head.

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Dykette is a riveting and often darkly funny novel that accurately examines New York queer culture with an insider's authenticity.” As the late December afternoons blur together in a haze of debaucherous homecooked feasts and sweaty sauna confessions, so too do the guests’ secret and shifting motivations. When Jesse and Darcy collaborate an ill-fated livestream performance, a complex web of infatuation and jealousy emerges, sending Sasha down a spiral of destructive rage that threatens each couple’s future.

Sasha playacts at adulthood when she tries to force her boyfriend to propose and commit to one day co-parenting children, before figuring out a little too late that that’s not the way she’ll get what she wants — if not that force isn’t exactly the best way to love someone. Petulant and self-absorbed, prone to public tantrums, she remains deeply immature throughout the novel, even childish. “Like poetry, she operated under dream logic — the logic of association, images, feelings,” Davis writes. Like poetry, I wondered— or like children? also while typing “jenny’s high femme camp antics” i couldn’t help but think of the l word’s jenny schecterA] biting gay millennial comedy of manners...While depicting rituals both mundane and vaunted...the novel also plumbs its characters’ fears of intimacy, failure, and irrelevance." Unfolding over ten heady days, Dykette is an unforgettable love story at the crossroads of queer nonconformity and seductive normativity. With propulsive