A Crystal Diary
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Frankie Hucklenbroich's razor-edged, compelling, often wryly humorous story hustles us from the blood-and-beer-drenched corners of her St. Louis meat-packing district '5Os youth, through the sex-soaked Hollywood alleys of her '6Os baby butch years, into the druggy metropolis of '70s San Francisco. Moving relentlessly from one woman to another until faces and bodies blur, scamming her existence, learning what the street has to teach: how to make a buck, how to make it with a woman, how to court the dangers of crystal meth, how to survive.Publishers WeeklyReaders may recognize the start of Hucklenbroich's fine autobiographical first novel as "Salisbury Joe," the evocative childhood story of a neighbor who comes back from the army as a "he/she," which originally appeared in the anthology Women on Women 3. But the innocence of those early experiences disappears fast, leaving a slightly older Nicky learning the ropes of being a butch and living off the streets of St. Louis. In chapters that read like short stories, Nicky travels from city to city and woman to woman, from 1957 to the early 1970s. Nicky's butch existence revolves around finding places to stay, girlfriends to con and ways to make a living without working that will support her methamphetamine habit. Hucklenbroich's prose is vivid and detailed, but it is more hard-edged than nostalgic. Bits and pieces of Nicky's personality are revealed carefully, missing chunks often left out and saved for revelations in later chapters. The overall sense of time and place is skillfully communicated, the trials of homophobiaoften violentwoven into a myriad of other ups and downs of daily life. The epilogue, which seems to exist so the reader gets the point that living as a butch was hard, is merely didactic. Hucklenbroich's debut will no doubt be compared to Leslie Feinberg's acclaimed Stone Butch Blues, as both novels deal with similar protagonists and histories. But while Crystal Diary may not be as dramatic or emotionally charged as Feinberg's novel, it is an equally well-rendered account of a difficult lesbian history. (Apr.)
