The Collaboration
The Novels
Approaching Delilah: A Novel in Eight Parts
Delilah is escaping the stifling rural Ohio and her small town boyfriend for the big life in NYC. She knows she is meant for bigger things, and she eventually proves it as she does whatever it takes to achieve the spotlight that she so desperately craves. Delilah has always been unconventional, thrill-seeking, and straight forward about her desire to be the center of attention, and the reader can see immediately that she is not the grounded Ohio girl our conventional narrator needs her to be.
The story is set partly in the fictional small town of Paliston, Ohio, in Washington D.C. and in New York City and spotlights events that occur between 1980 and 2021. Our narrator, a historian who specializes in rare and collectable books, has sporadic contact with Delilah throughout his adulthood. Despite their relatively few interactions, he still manages to project all sorts of characteristics onto her including his unrelenting belief that he is an important person in her life. Although Delilah is flirtatious and unrestrained and often sends him ambiguous messages, she clearly has her own life which has little to do with him. Mostly our narrator's obsession is not taken seriously by Delilah who, after successfully marketing herself as a hip young tell-all memoirist, eventually settles into the role of Upper East Side ostentatious trophy wife. What will it take for our narrator to recognize his delusional thinking? How many humiliations, embarrassments, and missed opportunities will he endure before he removes his distorting glasses?
APPROACHING DELILAH is structured thematically with eight sections each conveying a different approach to understanding Delilah (Through Humility, Through Art, etc.). The humor, tone and vivid details are strongly influenced by HARUKI MURAKAMI and JOSHUA COHEN's works and the novel alludes to Cervantes' DON QUIXOTE and to the Samson and Delilah story.
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I Ain't a Girl
Paul Joseph is a Catholic school teenager with a girlfriend, a starting position on the school's soccer team, a recently deceased father, and a young man who, for some inexplicable reason, has suddenly experienced significant shrinkage, grown long thick hair and developed female breasts. His mother and the family priest (with whom the mother is having an affair) attribute this to some bizarre reaction to illicit drug use, but Paul Joseph adamantly denies using. Faced with publicly living his life as a female and the family priest's insistence that he be transferred to Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrows (an all-girls school), Paul Joseph does what seems to him to be the only thing he can do, he runs away and hides in his father's primitive cabin located near the Allegheny River where he hopes to figure out what is happening to him. While there he is visited by three peculiar individuals who push him into actively confronting his identity and which climaxes in Paul Joseph fighting for his life and his virtue as he wrestles against an invader who intends to violate and perhaps kill him.
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The story is set partly in Paul Joseph's family home in Pittsburgh and partly in a secluded cabin near the Allegheny River and takes place from Ash Wednesday to Easter Sunday. Structurally Paul Joseph narrates the story in the past tense and with a distinct and unusual vernacular which suggests a modern day Huck Finn. Just as Twain's novel remains ambiguous in its commentary on race, I AIN'T A GIRL remains intentionally ambiguous in its commentary about gender. Paul Joseph does not identify as a female, but with his new female body, many mistake him for a female and aside from confronting this discontinuity, he is also experiencing the patriarchy's sexualization of the female and social media vitriol.
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I AIN'T A GIRL is structured as a therapeutic accounting that Paul Joseph has been tasked to write out by his therapist who believes that writing out his experience will be therapeutically beneficial. Paul Joseph is skeptical about this and the therapist may or may not have leaked the document to the public.
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The tragicomic tone, distinct narrative voice and exploration of identity are strongly influenced by MIEKO KAWAKAMI's BREASTS AND EGGS, D. FOY's MADE TO BREAK and CAROLA DIBELL's THE ONLY ONES. The work riffs off Twain's HUCK FINN in the way MURAKAMI's KILLING COMMENDATORE riffs off Fitzgerald's THE GREAT GATSBY and KINGSOLVER's DEMON COPPERHEAD riffs off Dickens' DAVID COPPERFIELD.
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