This one's a novel, but in almost short story form. Her main character, that she keeps returning to, is Rachel Spark, a 30 year old writing teacher who is losing her mother to breast cancer and not willing to let go. Partly to drown her despair, she hooks up with a string of random men. But - and this is a very nice stylistic touch that enriches Glatt's story - interspersed with Rachel's saga are the stories of 3 other women who lives intersect with hers in some way or another. And the men in the story all reappear as well. Their setting, a well-to-do corner of beachfront south Los Angeles (county at least), forms its own very small world.
I found myself trying to explain the title to a friend the other day. I didn't do a very good job, so I'll let Glatt do it:
... it occurred to me that I hadn't learned one damn thing in seventeen years of fucking. Since that first wrong boy on the bathroom tile took my new nipple between his teeth. I was worried even then about being unlovely, un loved, and on that black-and-white floor of h is, everything was slick and cold. Within minutes of my first kiss I was stripped like a squid and knew he didn't care whether I was Carol from third period or Christine from sixth or bad Brittany [...] and something inside me hardened, turned into a chunk of cement.
A girl becomes a comma like that, with wrong boy after wrong boy; she becomes a pause, something quick before the real thing. Even now, I am certain that the light coming from his parents' room was a warning that the sincere lovers of the world existed elsewhere, not where I was, and that it would always be like that...
Not so uplifting, no. But sincerely felt. And beautifully written. Reading how these women, as young as 16, strive to be something more and still sometimes push away those chances at more, it made me realize all over again how vulnerable we really are. And yet the connections we make, fleeting or otherwise, can simultaneously be so touching.
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