Honey Mine by Camille Roy
Nightboat Books, 2021.
Purchase Honey Mine at Nightboat Books or Bookshop
Honey Mine, by Camille Roy, edited by Lauren Levin and Eric Sneathen, unfolds as both excavation and romp, an adventure story that ushers readers into a lesbian writer’s coming of age through disorienting, unsparing, and exhilarating encounters with sex, gender, and distinctly American realities of race and class. From childhood in Chicago’s South Side to youth in the lesbian underground, Roy’s politics find joyful and transgressive expression in the liberatory potential of subculture. In these new, uncollected, and out-of-print fictions by a master of New Narrative, find a record of survival and thriving under conditions of danger.
Praise for Honey Mine
It’s poetry stretched over mountains of prose, mythic and dirty like a genius’s sex diary told outta the side of their mouth in a torn bathrobe with a topical map on the back that includes genitals, wisdom & lore. It’s held together by love – lost & known. And the healing power of silence. Honey Mine is one hell of a unique book. It’s a study. It disrupts the category, be it literature, fiction, the essay or the lesbian. It says: whatever you have the nerve to do, I will also do. Honey Mine is an inspirational work. —Eileen Myles
This is a huge book; it belongs in the canon of the best queer writers. To read Honey Mine is to be inhabited by the largesse of the word ‘lesbian,’ body, sex, sexuality. And by a lesbian aesthetic of human relations, bookended by the author’s magnificent enduring love with her late partner Angie. These fictions, in resisting…before the theorems arrive… teleological primness, parade language nimble enough to absorb class, cities, memory, grief, shame, without sacrificing a cornucopia of pleasures. Like a tarte tatin, Honey Mine spills over with deliciousness. My tactic vis a vis narrative, says Camille Roy, is really just to bring abandonment into the relationship. She succeeds marvelously. —Gail Scott
“From Camille Roy’s work, I have learned literal worlds; frog-kicked through summers in musty, abandoned cabins, tread the concrete divisions of Chicago’s South Side. In this expansive, formally promiscuous collection, ‘stories don’t work.’ Fiction and fantasy function not as creative effacements of the brute facts of queer life, but as the very means by which that life innovates itself—as relational, as fickle, as an ongoing ‘survival of self.’ Gauntlet of girlhood ideology, love letter peeled open like a garlic clove. Honey Mine takes apart the toolbox of narrative mechanisms; the aberrant languages and intimacies we use to scrape, mould and manipulate one another. Never bowing to romanticism and yet unmistakable in its communion, this is a book that has, in many ways, seeded and re-made me. I am so grateful for it.” —Trisha Low
