Dykette: A Novel

Product Information

If you’re in the mood for a sexy novel that explores the messiness of queer relationships, Dykette should be on your list.” The precursor to Dykette is Davis’s 2020 essay for Los Angeles Review of Books, “ High Femme Camp Antics,” a manifesto and polemic that announced a new kind of lesbian archetype, an over-the-top femme who, when their desire is too big or complicated or unsavory to be satisfied, performatively acts out excessive femininity. Examples, as she writes in the article, include “Alice B. Toklas replacing the word ‘may’ with ‘can’ every time it appeared while copyediting Gertrude Stein’s Stanzas in Meditation because Stein’s ex-lover was named May. The top-bitch attitude of Glee’s Santana, played by the late Naya Rivera, along with her smirky catchphrase, ‘wanky.’” Even the lane that is Dykette's birthright, that of Maggie Nelson and Michelle Tea-esque queer or queered femme writing, isn't improved by this addition to the genre.

Dykette is an invigorating and hilarious examination of queer identity and intimacy. It's a novel about being trapped--trapped inside your own head, trapped Davis delights in upending concepts of gender and sexuality...It's worth adding to the weekend bag.”

Need Help?

The book is beautifully written, but has very little to say. It builds itself up as some modern take on white butch/femme dynamics. It cannot accomplish this because the butches in the book, two of them trans, are marginalized by the text itself. Jesse was in the bedroom next door to the bathroom, on the phone with Faye the psychotherapist. Though it was their first afternoon in Hudson, and technically they were on vacation, Jesse had forgotten to cancel before Faye’s forty-eight-hour cancellation window, so she’d excused herself from the rest of the group for the fifty-minute phone session to avoid paying Faye’s cancellation fee. Sasha’s phone read 3:23, meaning that half an hour of Jesse’s therapeutic hour remained. stars because I plowed through more than half in an evening just to find out what the hell was even happening. There was so much detail for such meaningless things and it dragged on and on (I don't care about every detail of each characters' outfit and what brands they are wearing, etc). I almost DNF because it was so bizarre and arbitrary but there was just enough curiosity in me that wanted to find out what the point of all of it was. Sasha, for all her baggage, does understand more than she gets credit for. She has a keen intuitive sense for real vulnerability, and the kind of gender fluidity reserved for those one really trusts. The trouble is, none of these characters are all that trustworthy.

In a lot of ways, irony and persona are the primary modes by which she interacts with people. We see her game outplay her by the end. There's nothing left to perform, but there's also nothing more sincere than performing for her. For whatever reason, it's how she engages with the world. And like any way of interacting with the world, there will come a point that the world just becomes completely disorienting and illegible to you. It feels like the queer world is constantly evolving. Maybe we're all too terminally online? But the struggle of being queer is the general outsiderness one experiences from the rest of the world. Yet at the same time, some people are just ~more~ or less gay than others, and their outsiderness exists in a different spectrum. This a major factor for Sasha, who is very feminine, versus Jesse who is masc, and other characters in the story who have had top surgery, go by they/them, etc.

Social Media

the LARB article also discusses your inventing game called “come inside” while recovering from an infected cyst, an experience sasha recounts in dykette This is a book full of queer vocabulary and gossip written in a bold, unapologetic way. And why should it be otherwise? With Dykette, Davis has filled what has been mostly an empty shelf in the literary world.” Dykette is a riveting and often darkly funny novel that accurately examines New York queer culture with an insider's authenticity.” —BUST Magazine “In her Sasha is, if you've read the author's prior work, pretty obviously a self-insert. Same dog, same opinions, same behavior by her own admission. There are other characters who are also avatars. Sasha's primary rival, Darcy, is unmistakably a spin on a certain Brooklyn it-girl. Jules is nakedly Rachel Maddow.