This book is my all time favorite modern novel. I read it every year, I think I've read it six times now, but to me, this book was a welcome and needed journey down a dark rabbit hole I needed to explore. The descriptiveness of the writing is revelatory. The book reads like poetry. It gave me a sense of hope for my own life. I was married to a bisexual man whom I adored, a former stripper and "hustler" who simply could not be faithful to me. I could relate to so much of the story line, and the characters, Jessie, Bell, Madison and Madam Pig. It is a dark, lonely, sad walk down deserted streets with fallen and doomed people who won't and cannot be saved. How many of those same characters have you seen in your own life? Too many for many people In so many ways I felt the proverbial connection to Jessie. Her intense solitary loneliness, her desire for goodness and to protect and love this man, who is so clearly intent on destroying himself. To want to save him, to be unable to save him. The language is lush, beautiful. The characters broken and yet the thinnest veil of hope seems to survive somehow. The book was immensely popular when it first came out in the early 90's and it continues to be. Perhaps that's why on June 7th, 2017 Maggie Nelson of The Paris Review wrote an article on the 25th "anniversary" of its publication and why it is still such a beautiful story. Its THAT good, that seminal and important to American culture and the world of letters. I realize I'm a nut about this book but I've got valid reasons to be. It reads like poetry, like a song, drifting along the periphery of your awareness and Jessie and Bell haunt you, just like those other people in your life haunt you. Excellent novel, wonderful read and I cannot recommend this book enough.

(4.5)

This is what I hoped Lisa Taddeo’s Animal would be and it didn’t even come close.

Purely electrifying.

i got my copy of this book from a local secondhand bookstore and right the first time i saw it, i was captivated....and it did not disappoint.

to me, the book was able to capture angst, rage, vulnerability and sheer loneliness. it was lyrical and the sentence structures were so beautifully-written. it’s unconventional but very human.

P.S. best to check TW before reading.

Had to listen to Radiohead while reading

Suicide Blonde is an anti-love story, as its two protagonists (brittle "good girl", Jesse, who's never really been all that good, and weary, would-be actor, Bell, who can't stop performing) undergo the maudlin process of breaking up. The result is a woozy tale of dissolute characters having sex and trying to ease their misery in the fractured, contradictory city of San Francisco.

With its lyrical writing, casual bisexuality and gritty situations, this book feels like it was written for me. Or my 17-year-old self, anyway. A few years older/wiser, I must admit that, while Suicide Blonde's pretty package of misery is still appealing to me, I also recognize it as a wholly self-indulgent novel.

There's an inexplicable quality to the action. For instance, it's hard to believe that Jesse, who seems rootless as a ghost, would throw her lot in with beautiful, vicious Madison so readily. In fact, if anything, the novel reads like a bleak fantasy or dream sequence. It's hard to stay engaged with a narrative that is so meandering, and there were times, while reading, when I just got really tired of it.

With its unrelenting misery and whiff of pretension, some readers will undoubtedly find Suicide Blonde irritating. But, despite its flaws, I actually liked it a lot.

second in my “dissolute women” jaunt and i loved this. part horror, part poem, part odyssey and altogether very weird and sexy and devastating. had to read it a second time with a pen and paper to make sense of the symbolism. i love steineke and can’t wait to read more of her.

Such an interesting little story. I often think about how past experiences, whether it be familial, platonic, or romantic, directly impact our current relationships. The unresolved trauma you carry with you.

Lots of fun little one liners.

“I knew I was lonely and that she made me feel inadequate, but I have always been attracted to people who make me feel inadequate. But I wanted to center my life on myself, not this continuous pattern of revolving around another.”

suicide BLONDE

Smoky rooms, dangerous streets, sleazy sex, lit by neon, to a soundtrack of the 'Liebestod' from Tristan and Isolde, edgy, intense, brutal, where love is tainted but a heart might still be pure, drugs and dreams, purple prose, urban and urbane, Baudelaire meets Kerouac via Anais Nin and Sylvia Plath, love and lust, dirt and desire, experience and annihilation, hypnotic, seductive, lyrical, moody and melancholy, a hymn to loneliness and failed connections, modernity and loss - gorgeous, gorgeous!

Many thanks to Canongate for an ARC via NetGalley

I picked this up because of Maggie Nelson's name on the cover (she wrote a new foreword). I think it's obvious that this is an amazing book for someone (Nelson, to name one, it is exactly her set of interests) but not quite for me. Somehow, I think I'm not enough of a Christian to really understand this book about the sexual underworld. The energy that Steinke brings to this book is really remarkable--everything feels quite intense, whether it is just wandering burnt-out early 90s San Francisco or the sex and drugs and confrontations (the wedding scene!)--but the reasons for it all are clearly tied up in specifically Christian notions of sin and sacrifice and self-elimination that I just couldn't access enough to understand why anything was happening the way it was.

"Was it the bourbon or the dye fumes that made the pink walls quiver like vaginal lips?"

Two of my great friends live in San Fran and I know the lifestyle too well.

The pains over a bi-sexual boyfriend are menstrual, cutting, real. Fuck you, Bell. This stuff is great.

Madam Pig is real character.

Don't believe me? Read it.

I love Darcey Steinke, and while this book touches on the same themes that I'm drawn to in her other work, I don't care for the lens through which she examines them here. The writing is strong, as always, but it's not my kind of story. If you like gritty, sex-obsessed (but not pornographic) fiction about a young woman trying to figure out who she is and find her place in the world, you might like this.