SURVIVING MAE WEST - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Priscilla A. Rodd was born outside of Paw Paw, West Virginia, USA in an old farmhouse without running water or electricity. Her parents, who were Quaker activists, homeschooled Priscilla until she was eleven years old. She began public school the same year her family acquired indoor plumbing and a black-and-white television. Priscilla holds an MFA in fiction from the University of Pittsburgh. She currently teaches creative writing and lives in Charles Town, West Virginia, with her husband and fellow writer Deane Kern, and their two young sons.

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Tess, the protagonist/narrator of Surviving Mae West, is a young West Virginia woman, haunted by the trauma of a brutal rape. The novel opens on the day that Tess begins working as a prostitute in a New York City brothel, although her family believes she s an ordinary waitress in a Mexican restaurant. Rodd s novel utilizes a journal format, a structure that allows Tess to emerge with utter candor and realism as readers become privy to her secrets. Readers sink into Tess s complex inner world where intimacy is both dreaded and desired. Denise Giardina, acclaimed author of Storming Heaven and The Unquiet Earth, says of Tess: [She] can be exasperating, like watching a friend engage in self-destructive behavior. Yet we still care about her. Surviving Mae West is an uncensored story of survival and renewal, told by a narrator as unabashed as John Cleland s Fanny Hill (Fanny Hill: Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure), as flawed and plucky as Wally Lamb s Dolores Price (She s Come Undone), and as resilient as Dorothy Allison s Bone (Bastard Out of Carolina).