A Sexy, Sapphic Knife to the Gut: Women by Chloe Caldwell
If you haven’t read anything gay this month, here’s a searing novella you'll devour in a day.
Women by Chloe Caldwell follows a sickeningly sexy love affair between a messy mid-twenties writer and a hot older butch.
Enamoured by the elusive hot masc, our sweet, unnamed narrator falls hard into the throes of queer awakening.
“And I do vaguely remember, staring at her hands while she spoke, her knuckle tattoos, thinking they were the most beautiful hands I’d ever seen.”
Finn is established, boyish, and seductive. Also, in a committed, adult relationship.
She starts showing up at our narrator’s book readings, oversized collared shirt, stroking the writer’s ego. The poor girl is doomed from the beginning.
“It is profoundly easy to fall in love with an olive-skinned woman that touches you just so, and who has a tattoo of a quote from Orlando trailing down her back. Show me your tattoo again, I’d say in bed.”
The early stages of queer infatuation ensue.
“She has a Tea Tree toothpick in her mouth. She has the posture of a teenaged boy. I want to pummel her, wrestle her in the grass, give her new blue jeans grass stains, hump her leg.”
Like, exactly.
Written from such convincing post-breakup perspective, it’s hard to beleive these characters sprang from fiction. Paricuarly Finn, who is tailored with such intention, I felt as if she had broken by own heart.
“There is so much kissing. There is delicious sleep. That’s my girl, sweet girl, Finn tells me when she is making me come. Five months later, when she does not say these things anymore, I notice.”
Ouch.
Meanwhile, the unnamed protagonist is far less defined. Unravelling slowly as she begins to lose herself in obsession with Finn. Stealing her clothes, following her routine. The affair is all encompassing, dizzying. But Finn still lives another life, an apartment across town, a girlfriend of ten years.
The breakup is a slow but explosive death. Fights and fucking. And then the final stage — they communicate through book titles and blocking and unblocking on Goodreads. Can it get more sapphic?
Our narrator finds herself in an entirely new territory. Hard launched into queer love and then forced to face her queerness in the absence of that lover. Picking up pieces of Finn and finding new places they might fit.
“I buy a pair of Levi’s at a yard sale that are two sizes too large. They make me feel like Finn. I wonder if these jeans will help me attract women.”
What makes this story feel so lived in, perhaps, is the author’s ability to weave through the complexities of healing. After that first queer breakup, there is devastation, of course, but at the same time, the world is electric with possibility. A new energy between queer bodies. I could touch you just right. A secret hidden in a haircut, a wink.
She finds herself sulking in lesbian bars, burning over dykes in boots and white tanks.
“That night, I know the definition of yearning. I feel invisible.”
There’s no yearning like sapphic yearning. Like finding yourself in someone else. Like losing a person and a half when they leave.
“Isn’t it sad to talk about ex-lovers in the past tense as though they are dead?”
Indeed.
And yet there is art to be made, new lovers to meet. Building a new self and wearing a past love all in a pair of hand-me-down jeans.
Hottt adding to the list
Adding this to my list. Thanks for the rec!