Darned If I Can Tell You How Magic Works
But this award-winning novel can
If you read the description of Jeanne Thornton’s 2021 novel Summer Fun, you’ll learn that it’s the story of a young woman “obsessed with the Get Happies, the quintessential 1960s Californian band.” The character feels she needs to know: “Why did the band stop making music? Why did they never release their rumored album, Summer Fun?”
The book invites you, and you go along, “to get drinks, tall mimosas blooming with slices of unseasonable strawberry that glow neon red as you descend the stairs, as if you are torchbearers for a louche cult.” Yes, all the language is this rich.
Reality and Fiction
A fiction is a story that isn’t real, but it can be about real things, and it can raise the question of what is real and what we know. In our real life, we relentlessly interrogate what’s real. That is to say, to be real is to co-create reality.
“I flinched, a kind of third-order doom dysphoria coming over me. I didn’t want to talk about anything physical with Caroline with Ronda; I felt like Ronda was acting unfeminine — ergo, trans — by wanting to talk about it with me; yet I felt also this was what real — ergo, cis — women must do with one another in response to hookups with other women, and Ronda, being a better…
