Good novels you have read which have a lesbian as the main character

See also Jeannette Winterson, Nicola Griffith

Looking for recommendations for a high school student who is in the process of coming out. I gave her Funhome and she loved it and now she wants more stuff to read, but this is kinda a blindspot for me.

I have actually read Ammonite (which is speculative fic) and Slow River (which is ??) by Nicola Griffiths, and I can at least remember liking the first one very, very much. If it being sci-fi isn't a barrier.

the member of the wedding

Rebecca Brown's collection The End of Youth, especially "To Nancy Booth, Wherever You Are."

Brown's The Terrible Girls might be a good one, too.

i srsly love Radclyffe Hall but i am not sure i would recommend either The Well of Loneliness (or The Unlit Lamp for that matter) to a HS student in the process of coming out unless she enjoys making herself miserable (obv i did, but the path of miz was self-chosen).

Honestly there's prob a ton of new YA on this topic, I'm just not sure what it is. I mean we're publishing a book called I Am J written from the pt of view of a young FtM, I'm pret sure we have lesbian books around here someplace.

xp-tp-self god, i think back and all i remember are terrible sci-fi novels and crushingly sad schoolgirl-y stuff. :/

'Tipping the Velvet' is probably the most straightforwardly fun of the Waters novels?

Just finished and really enjoyed Mia Farlane's novel 'Footnotes to Sex'.

I just read a boggling bunch of comments on imdb that began because the original poster didn't believe there was a lesbian motif in "The Color Purple."

jeanette winterson is hella dykey

bump for more recommendations? so far the carson mccullers book looks promising. some of this stuff i wouldn't feel comfortable giving to a high school student tho (which is why I'm not giving her Rubyfruit Jungle)

The Jeannette Winterson debut about her years as a teenage fundie/emerging lesbian was published when she was 25 and is probably the right book.

Thanks, that looks great.

I interviewed her last summer and pre-worried because she's got form for being absolutely terrifying, but she was warm and funny and I could have spent HOURS chatting with her. Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit is often an assigned text for A Level English and the film adaptation is also worth a look.

i had 'the member of the wedding' assigned to me in HS fwiw

also i take it the collected hothead paisan is out of the question here

Dorothy Allison's Cavedweller, iirc.

sarah waters 'the night watch'. i think her other books are supposed to have lesbian main characters w/ the exception of 'the little stanger' but i havent read them

just realized that "kissing the witch" would probably work really well

No Djuna Barnes?

(i have not actually read Barnes, just trying to cover the obvious bases)

I read Nightwood. Hated it.

Ah, The Nightwood wars again.

sugar rush by julie burchill is supposed to be *actually* good i think

"Nightwood" is great fun if you're in the right mood, but at first her prose style can seem gratingly, staggeringly pretentious. There's also a snootful of weird, overdetermined representations of Jewishness to choke down in the early chapters before the lesbian (and tranny) stuff kicks in. If you like purple prose and heavy duty artificiality (ala Ronald Firbank, say) then you will dig it, but that's just not everybody's cup of tea.

oh, and I kinda found the lesbian character in "The Corrections" to be implausible- it felt very ventriloquized and "off" to me, and I'm not one to insist that only men can write male characters or only queers can write queer characters or what have you, but I just never really bought that sub-plot- it read like Franzen's lit-fic equivalent of when some dude pretends to be a woman online and imagines a kind of aerobics instructor-esque exaggerated persona that is more like pr0n than like, y'know, an actual female person

I should say that I read Nightwood along time ago as an undergrad in an Irish American Lit class which was sort of a weird place for it to begin with imo. Maybe I'll give it another shot.

I just read it for the first time this summer and some of the writing made me cry "Sheesh!" while reading particularly florid passages out loud to my boyfriend.

i totally do not remember the corrections having a lesbian character

nightwoods stupid

does donald barthelme's city life have some lesbian protagonists? I think so. maybe not.

Not a novel, but this Swedish movie is about two high school girls coming out, and it's very very good.

Spendid!

Mrs Dalloway has a brief momentary remembered lesbian past.

The Hours has a lesbian present.

It's not a novel and it's not explicitly about lesbians, but I just taught "Goblin Market" and it is amazing (and freely available on the internet). *and really sexy too*

I haven't read it yet, but ever since I heard about Rachilde's "Monsiuer Venus" I've been looking for it; unfortunately public libraries arent well stocked with Decadence (not even a copy of Huysmans!)

the wizard of oz. to kill a mockingbird. the heart is a lonely hunter. harriet the spy.

not a novel, but this piece of poetry is gorgeous if u haven't already heard it

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVwdgUAMB2w&feature=player_embedded

The sequel to the Wizard of Oz is this total gender studies meltdown.

Ozma disguised as a boy her whole life and being alarmed by the initial revelation I remember, but this is smoothed over p quickly (and she is totes settled in all the later books) - what else is in there?

The women of Oz all marching and revolting to take over the Emerald City with their steel knitting needles as weapons! Baum (& his family) iirc was pretty involved in the suffragette movement; he was secretary of his city's suffragette club.

It gives me such a knitting boner, that book does.

After the women take over the EC, the men of Oz are made to slave over constant household work. I know this is total three-year-old "I wear shoes on my head" level of mind-blower but Baum was maybe not the most perfect writer. Still a personal favorite person tho!

iIrc that stuff was largely bcz he was hoping for a stage adaptation and wanted to be able to shoehorn in leggy chorus girls marching, with their legs? (did not get this at the time obv, but read up a bit later, when I was 12 and got to go the the big library)

s'pose the Ozma thing would make perfect sense in that context too, with a principal boy

zomg

xpost, not the housework stuff

"I wear shoes on my head" level of mind-blower

lol jas mann

This has been the best moment of my week.

i like that thing mordy posted, wish she would slow down though

http://www.collectpeanuts.com/images/upload/120708/Animation/IMG_6451.jpg

the Bostonians! (i never knew what a 'boston marriage' was before i read this)

patricia highsmith "the price of salt"

originally published under a pseudonym (claire morgan)

Buffy comic books, and obv. Buffy in general.

Realize this post seems more of a "just throwing shit out there" but if you are recommended media for a teen coming out, I def think the show addresses how one handles it. Admittedly a lil shallow, but it's there.

marcie's gay, patty isn't imo

Buffy comic books, and obv. Buffy in general.

Buffy is lesbian?

the second par is the important one there

buffy had lesbian characters all the way through the last part of the season and explored these themes in a way that was continuous w/ previous tropes to do w/ like being an outsider and whedon's feminism which is connected to ideas about agency and subverting roles. buffy is a p good queer show for teenagers. also buffy is a p good show, well no its awesome.