Girl Walking Backwards
A Novel
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ISBN10: 0312194560
ISBN13: 9780312194567
Trade Paperback
264 Pages
$18.99
CA$26.99
As this novel begins, Skye wants what all teenagers want—to survive high school. She lives in Southern California, though, which is making that difficult. Her mother has fallen victim to the pseudo-New Age culture and insists on dragging her to consciousness-raising workshops and hypnotics. As if this weren't difficult enough, Skye falls in love with Jessica, a troubled gothic punk girl who cuts herself regularly with sharp objects.
But when Skye finds her boyfriend having sex with Jessica in a bathroom stall at a rave, her romantic illusions collapse and she has to face that fact that she's been running away from her mother's insanity. Right when things look their worst, though, Skye is helped by Mol, a pagan who becomes her true friend, and Lorri, a graceful volleyball player with whom she finds real love. From them she learns how to feel authentic emotions in a culture of poseurs and New Age charlatans.
In this edgy and insightful spin on the coming-of-age novel—a complex and contemporary world where growing up is all but irrelevant—this sort of emotional authenticity is the best gift of all.
Reviews
Praise for Girl Walking Backwards
"Let's stop kidding ourselves. California is a god-awful scary place where the golden glow of sex and drugs hides the money-soaked carcass of emotional vampirism. If you don't believe it, this agile and devastating portrait of a young California dyke will convince you. Skye is a senior in high school. Her parents fed her LSD as a child, her boyfriend watches her jerk off and tries to help her get a girlfriend, and she and the girl she wants to kiss dress dead birds in Barbie clothes. But the outrageous and the hilarious are actually the foundations of Skye's exquisite sanity. It's her mother's new age homophobia that wears her down. Dragged from one encounter group to another, threatened with hypnotism and rebirthing classes, Skye and her scortching virgin sexuality are under emotional and psychic siege. By the time this strangely funny novel has shown us Skye's ghastly movie mogul dad in action down in L.A., then takes us back up to Santa Barbara in time for her mother to rocket into queer-hating orbit, you'll never want to go to California again. But don't despair; Williams is a good fairy after all, blessing her work and its achingly gay heroine with lovely youthful sex, as redemptive as it gets."—Out magazine
"Bett Williams makes you laugh and then makes you feel guilty for laughing. Girl Walking Backwards is brilliant Southern gothic merged with punk rock and moved West. An honest, tender, and nasty rendering of self-mutilation and New Age fascism, this book establishes Williams as one of the most original novelists around."—Barry Grahman, author of The Book of Man and Before
"Girl Walking Backwards is about style and vulnerability and trying to grow up in a world without adults. Author Bett Williams is smart, charming, writes about characters engagingly, and knows how to drive a sentence."—Blanche McCrary, author of Terminal Velocity, The Revolution of Little Girls, and The Redneck Way of Knowledge
"Authentic in both pain and humor, Girl Walking Backwards is the tale of a girl lost, whose plight is as touchable as it is believable."—Steven Levenkron, author of The Best Little Girl in the World, The Luckiest Girl in the World, and Cutting: Understanding and Overcoming Self-Mutilation