by Kelly Cogswell (Author)
It's summer. An American writer wanders Paris. After several years back home in New York, the city is foreign and hostile, resentful. Stones trip her. Strangers attack. "Hey! Lesbian!" Even her journal betrays her when French intrudes, replacing her native tongue.
As she struggles to express herself, memories rise to the surface. There's the family nest. Her first crush in far- off Kentucky where churches spring up as ferociously as blackberry bushes. The banishment by her mother when she pronounces that word, lesbian. Then her life in New York where she meets a woman herself cast adrift from Cuba by a violent wave of homophobia.
Drawn from her diaries, this account of all her exiles is a lyrical meditation on memory, language and foreignness itself.
This work is the second of a trilogy.
Translated from the original French.