Dykette: A Novel

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It’s time to be an adult, to be normal,” seethes Sasha, the titular “dykette” in Jenny Fran Davis’s queer zillennial comedy of manners. They do a lot of work on: how can femininity be, quote unquote, taken seriously, while not becoming masculinized?

I guess my most sympathetic reading of Dykette is that dyke archetypes lack fun in most of the queer lit I've read, and this book was queer melodrama at its best.We sense danger ahead in the form of rage, want, and need, bubbling up through the constant display of startling aggression. It’s a novel about being trapped—trapped inside your own head, trapped inside relationships, and trapped inside a chilly upstate New York vacation home. Recently, I started reading Sarah Schulman’s book Let the Record Show, which is all about being queer in the 1980s and confronting AIDS as queer people who were unified in some important ways but who also came from vastly different lived experiences and had really different needs. Gays hated overhead lighting; Jules, their host and the house’s owner, had let the original ceiling fixture dust over, taped down the light switches.

Her disposition lacks any crumb of an earnest heart, and like most of the characters in this book, I found her kind of insufferable. When a pair of older, richer lesbians—prominent news host Jules Todd and her psychotherapist partner, Miranda—invites Sasha and Jesse to their country home for the holidays, they’re quick to accept.The farther you zoom out, the scarier it gets; I’m definitely worried and afraid about what’s going on in the world and feel absolutely a part of it. By the end of the book, I’d started to think of a “dykette” as the femme version of a “boi” or an androgynous masc/butch with Peter Pan syndrome. So Sasha is your average normcore pick-me girlie performing her gender and conforming to societal expectations, she's just also a lesbian. it’s quite literally, the perfect type of book i want from contemporary lesbian stories (maybe with a black lead instead but yknow, baby steps ig).