I: What does it mean to be a scholar?
R: It means I knew all the tropes. I’d read hundreds of books. Could name the popular authors. I learned a lot about what femme lesbians wear, according to these authors. The kinds of heels a high-fashion lesbian would wear. I learned how much people who are not writing experimental novels have their characters eat pizza and watch TV. It was like getting a tour through a kind of living that had eluded me before. I was always weird—even as a kid—living a weird life. And although I would argue I have a great capacity for emotional response (in certain conditions), reading these books somehow taught me about the little things. It’s weird, because I should have known them, but I think maybe I was cynical toward them.

The narrator of My Lesbian Novel is Renee Gladman, an artist and writer who has produced the same acclaimed body of experimental art and prose as real-life Renee Gladman, and who is now being interviewed by an unnamed interlocutor about a project in process, a seeming departure from her other works, a lesbian romance. Between reflections on art making and on the genre of lesbian romance—“though aspects of the formula drive me crazy . . . people who write these stories understand how beautiful women are”—a romance novel of her own takes shape on the page, written alongside the interview, which sometimes skips whole years between questions, so that time and aging become part of the process. The result is a beautifully orchestrated dialogue between reflection and desire, or clarity and confusion, between the pleasures of formula and the pleasures of freedom in the unspooling of sentences over time. [publishers’ note]