While she had come to prize this private time with Mrs. “Obviously,” Mallory said, trying to hide how much this hurt her. Obviously, that means we won’t be seeing much of each other.” “She’s coming back in a few weeks, for summer break. Allard laughed once, a little absently, as if distracted. The title may refer to the central affair but it refers to so much in the suffocating suburban culture from which Mallory emerges. Through her relationships with her best friend Hannah - and with Hannah’s mother - we’re reminded that so many people have to decondition the learning that queerness is something to hide. The book is at its best once it moves to the past. Sometimes we seek people we know can’t hurt us because they’re unavailable - they’re often who hurt us the most.
She doesn’t want to get close to anyone, doesn’t want to be controlled by anyone, but she’s still so filled with need. Like so many of us at that age, she seeks the unattainable because she’s frightened of attainment. She’s just a teenager in a new environment who recently lost her mom and is looking for her own version of belonging. She is not the youthful seductress or the innocent victim. Mallory’s understanding of herself was shaped long before she found a middle-aged German vessel to rest within.ĭuring the first sections of the book focused on the affair, Mallory is forward in her actions, passive in her thoughts. By the time Mallory met the woman, she was already a person in a place to do so. Hart demonstrates how this is both true and false. To Mallory, her affair with who is only called “the woman” was life-changing and all-consuming. But Hart’s novel is such a triumph because it goes beyond this one defining relationship. Jacqueline Audry’s 1950 film Olivia does this as well. This isn’t the first work of art to take this common queer experience in fiction and in life and uncover its depth. It’s such a common trope, I sometimes forget how rarely it’s done well. But as I continued, delving deeper into Mallory’s thoughts, deeper into Mallory’s past and future, the value of this specific telling became clear. This is going to be a lesbian age gap romance in a school setting like so many stories before. It’s less an introduction to a character and a story and more a declaration of a subgenre. Michelle Hart’s debut novel, We Do What We Do in the Dark, begins with a deceptive simplicity: “When Mallory was a freshman in college, she had an affair with a woman twice her age.” Like most of the stories we tell ourselves, it’s fiction. Like most of the stories we tell ourselves, it’s a coping mechanism. Sadness hurts less when you tell yourself it’s intrinsic to your identity and when you tell yourself that identity has value. Life is hard, life is lonely, and there is a depth to accepting these truths as facts.
I became accustomed to isolation, accustomed to a feeling of want. I’ve never been comfortable with happiness.Īs a child, I was quiet.
It made me slightly envious of the teenagers who are growing up in this modern world. It just means that we acknowledge that sexual preference falls on a spectrum, and that it can change from day to day. There’s no deep dive into whether that makes either one of them *gasp* a lesbian.
Had this conversation happened back in the ’90s, perhaps it would have been quite scandalous, but these days it barely gets a mention. One friend very casually threw into conversation that she made out with a girl the other night, because it felt right.Īnother friend then mentioned that she and her boyfriend usually watch lesbian porn because it’s more sensual. Not so long ago, I was at a long lunch with some girlfriends, and as happens after a few bottles of wines, we started discussing our sex lives.