Passing remarks - Softcover

Hodgman, Helen

2.7

23 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0868246778 ISBN 13: 9780868246772

Publisher: Anchor, 1996

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Two things happened to Rosemary that early summer;
she won $30,000 playing Keno at the Hakoah Club and
she fell in love with a woman much younger than herself.
Thus, laden with luck, she entered her fifty-first year. . . .
When middle-aged, academic Rosemary meets twenty-seven-year-old Billie--a woman with a tough bike and an even tougher attitude--she goes weak at the knees. Yet when Billie speeds off on a soul-searching bender through the Australian outback, Rosemary is left to ponder love and longevity, and weather a few adventures of her own.

Cooped up for the summer with the eccentric Daphne--who is busy transforming her body into a tattooed biography of her mad mother's life--Rosemary unwittingly winds up with a leading role in a lesbian porn flick, loses her car to a shears-wielding murderer, and still finds time to compost her garden and miss Billie to no end. Yet as each woman's path twists through a hilarious comedy of manners and mishaps, one fact remains: relationships lie in the sometimes capable--sometimes careless--hands of coincidence.

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Review:

This is an extremely funny novel about the culture shock experienced by a 51-year old Australian lesbian who takes a motorcycle-riding lover nearly half her age. By the time she wins $30,000 in the lottery, Rosemary has spent more than a few years slightly bored with her life as an academic. With her new fortune, she leaves her job and looks forward to lazing in her garden. Her unexpected affair with the slim, boyish Billie somehow leads Rosemary to helping solve a string of car thefts and landing a role in a homemade S/M film. Hodgeman's novel will be a terrific read for anyone looking for witty dialogue, surprising plot, and lots of humor. --Rebecca Brown

From the Publisher:

I knew after reading the first paragraph that I would love this book, and I did. The narrative voice blends its topics so smoothly and makes transitions do effortlessly that it almost seems like inspired stream of consciousness. It's not. It's just very well done. The relationship between the omnipotent narrator and its characters really intrigues me. It joins with their perspectives and comments on them at the same time, like the conversation most of us have in our own heads, like the me/not-me relationship an actor has with her character. It reminds me of another important gay novel, Christopher Isherwood's A Single Man, in that way. A comedy of errors where everything is out-of-sorts and odd but the romance between Billie and Rosemary is always sincere. I'm really looking forward to her next book.

-S. Gutierrez, Assistant editor

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