It wasn’t even a chic street corner, certainly nothing you’d write about in an arch novel of manners, but there Lynn was, on that unfashionable intersection, dumped by her lover of 13 years because they were no longer “enlarging themselves” – like the road to bliss was stuffing yourself with rich Belgian chocolate. What’s a lonely urban girl to do except completely fall apart and into every bed she can find?
Lynn quickly finds herself sleeping with two much younger women, one of whom just happens to be the daughter of a famous feminist. Sometimes the only way to survive utter desolation and despair is to look at the bright side – three hours of sleep a night due to competing lovers’ sexual demands, the privilege of ghostwriting a book for a woman who carves large wooden sculptures of women’s genitalia, and an ex “enlarging” you to become the 10-year-old you always wanted to be.
“[Chicken] is Paula Martinac’s sharpest, funniest, and coolest book. I find that I know Lynn very well, and I was rooting for her throughout her comic misadventures in the madcap landscape of Nineties LesBiGay Dating Land. Now how do we convince Ellen DeGeneres to play her in the movie?”
–Felice Picano, author of Like People in History
