Confession Time 2: Guilty Pleasures Edition

What’s that Grace? You were hideously unorganised this week and left everything to the last minute AGAIN, and now have less than an hour to write a blog post? How unusual. That’s not like you at all. Yes, I know leaving things to the last minute is how Caitlin Moran does it, but she’s cleverer than you and has much better hair. Let’s just get on with it, shall we?

Reader, we are gathered here today to talk about guilty pleasures. Or rather, one guilty pleasure in particular. I actually don’t have many. If I like something I tend to own it, get very excited about it, and go on about it endlessly until my girlfriend’s eyes glaze over. This happens quite a lot. But as a book seller, literature graduate, and literary fiction fan, this particular one is something that I tend not to talk about. I buy these books on my kindle and read them furtively on buses when no one is looking. My guilty pleasure is 1950’s lesbian pulp fiction. Specifically the work of Ann Bannon, lesbian pulp queen and all round awesome lady. The writing is bad (in a good way), the plots are melodramatic, and there is lots of sex and smouldering eye contact, and I absolutely Eat. That. Shit. Up.

Now, if I were being literary and pretentious, I could try to defend my love of lesbian pulp. I could say that historically they’re really interesting, providing an insight into the position of lesbians in post-war America at a time when being homosexual was still illegal, heavily stigmatised, and undoubtedly dangerous. It gives us a window into these women’s lives, the way in which they viewed themselves and their relationships. They are a piece of homosexual history. And yeah, this is all true, and very important, and yada yada yada. But we all know the real reason that dykes like me (and a large audience of straight men, for that matter) LOVE these books, even back when they had to be read super furtively and hidden under mattresses. Because they are FUN. I love Laura Landon and her unstable, tempestuous, and (later) abusive relationship with Beebo Brinker (get a load of that alliteration, guys). As someone who was just coming out at university, I loved reading about American college students falling in love with a sorority sister, the will-they-won’t-they of their relationship made even more tense by the social stigma and the risk of being expelled from school. They are great fun and my immediate go to if I want something that doesn’t require any kind of thought. Complicated, they are not, but interesting? Absolutely.

Because it’s true. They are a piece of history. The way in which homosexuality is talked about as something you can learn, something that is conditioned, but becomes inherent and impossible to change, is a far cry from the “Born This Way” attitude of many 21^st century homosexuals. Laura’s close, almost idyllic, friendship with homosexual Jack provides comfort to him when male homosexuality is shown to always end in heartbreak: though homosexuality is not seen as an illness, the relationships are seen as less enduring than heterosexual love. It blights the life of Bannon’s characters, leaving them drinking heavily, alone, once they reach middle age and younger lovers lose interest. In true pulp fashion, passion can drive people to madness, and a definite feeling of violence boils just under the surface of much of Bannon’s work. It can be dark. It’s not all sex and sunshine and rainbows. But it’s not all negative, either. Homosexual love is portrayed as real, homosexuality is not seen as a disease, and very progressive ideas such as interracial relationships and homosexual parenting are addressed in the later books.

But let’s face it. We’re not really here for the history. We’re here for the smouldering eye contact, smoking butches, and the sex. So go fourth, faithful reader. Give Ann Bannon a go. For history. For science.

(and for lesbians)

Confession Time

Okay, confession time. My name is Grace, and I am a pretty bad book collector. And not just any book collector, I’m one of THOSE book collectors. The kind where you find yourself buying yet another copy of a book you already own because it’s a DELUXE EDITION, GUYS, or has all new content from the author, or has a limited edition cover, or is a limited run reissue, or… well, the list goes on. My room is full of books. So full, it can be kind of hard to find room for anything else. And yet, I can’t stop myself from buying more. And I know quite a few of them are duplicates: I have three copies of Wuthering Heights, for example, and the same number of Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber. Usually there’s a good reason for this (or at least that’s what I tell myself). With The Bloody Chamber, one copy is my old college paper back, lovingly (and heavily) annotated and beaten to a pulp. The next is a beautiful Folio Society hard back with slip cover, so you can see why I just HAD to have it. The last is the recent Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition released this year in commemoration of what would have been Carter’s 75^th birthday. The cover was so gorgeous I nearly died.

I justify each duplicate to myself with increasingly convoluted excuses. Well, my Nan gave me that one so I can’t get rid of it. That one’s part of a set, so I’ve got to keep it. That one is a Waterstones exclusive edition with a new author introduction, so it’s practically a whole new book. I’m a sucker for a pretty cover, or new “previously unpublished” material, or anything numbered: basically, anything that isn’t your basic run of the mill paperback I will covet instantly. I fetishise books. To me, it’s as much about the object as what’s inside them. I’m not a big Susan Hill fan, but when a new hardback edition of The Woman in Black came into the bookshop where I work I seriously considered buying it because it was just so pretty. While I own an e-reader and completely recognise the practicality and beauty of being able to carry an entire library in your bag, not to mention how enabling they are for visibility impaired book lovers, I will never be fully converted. I would always rather have the physical object, rather go into a bookshop and be able to handle the books I’m buying. Imagine a world where you couldn’t go into a bookshop and just BROWSE. No thank you. I’m one of those weirdos who sniffs her books. Not to mention if I get one with good paper: I freaked out a woman sitting next to me on a delayed train out of London once by lovingly stroking the pages of the Oxford Classics edition of Tess of the D’Urbervilles because I suddenly realised how good the paper quality was. So smooth. So pretty.

Both my parents are book lovers. My father, whose eyesight is poor, is a total e-reader convert, but my mother rallies against them, believing firmly in the power and beauty of books as objects. She also worked as a bookseller years ago, and introduced me to all my favourite angry women: Fay Weldon, Angela Carter, Emily Brontë. We have always discussed books, picking them apart in detail, and sharing our ever growing collection of paperbacks, and her love of reading is, I believe, a massive part of why I love it so much. However, even she can’t understand my obsession with book collecting, my willingness to part with (relatively) large sums of money to buy books I already own because it’s a nice edition. My mother is a practical woman, more interested in the stories than what binds them. So I can’t blame this quirk on her. No, this is me, 100% my weird obsession. However, it’s not one I can see myself giving up any time soon. I’m off now. If you need me, I’ll be in Waterstones.