the homoerotic over-current of the lyrics while we're both sat in the living room in our bras and curlers is just.

I can't wait to read Eliza Clark's next book, but I have to say-- the fact that she wrote a character like this slightly terrifies me. Originally from Newcastle and now living in London, Eliza Clark is the author of Boy Parts and Penance. This shakes you around like a rag doll and you love it as you begin to see Boy Parts as your dominant partner and while you are going to get pleasure you are also going to get pain. you were always on the edge of your seat wanting to know what she'd do next, but then randomly she would have these moments where she was relatable or at least more understandable, which made the book hard to put down.sometimes when you read books written by male authors, particularly older books, almost every female character in the book is subjected to a rather scrutinising description of their body and appearance. This character will rarely if ever acknowledge or indicate that she finds people who are not men attractive. the whole thing honestly felt like you were tripping on the same drugs irina, flo and finch were - and i loved it!

It’s just, as far as my parents are aware, I’ve never had sex, I’ve never taken drugs, and I definitely don’t know what the member of a man looks like. Home to William Golding, Sylvia Plath, Kazuo Ishiguro, Sally Rooney, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Max Porter, Ingrid Persaud, Anna Burns and Rachel Cusk, among many others, Faber is proud to publish some of the greatest novelists from the early twentieth century to today.I am not saying that I want every story to include r*pe or SA to be serious and to exclusively revolve around this. I wish that the story had committed to paint her as a morally reprehensible character we were meant not to like. the walls are lined with bookshelves that seem to exclusively contain manga, graphic novels and comic books.

I mean, compared to We Play Ourselves, Self-Portrait with Boy, and Generation Loss (all of whom happen to focus on queer young women who are not portrayed as exclusively interested in men and in replicating tired dom/sub dynamics) Boy Parts just doesn’t go much into depth when it comes to Irina and her changing relationship to her photography. Boy Parts is an impressive debut that, considering the subject matter, reads like she just punched out the scariest person in prison on the first day.Irina’s expression of both her sexual and creative desire stands out: “We don’t often see or encounter women who feel free to express that they like sex in this way,” Joyce says. And I can forgive a lack of intersectionality and dimension if say this, like Plath's Bell Jar, had been published in the 1960s. My only caveat is that I have to find said unlikable characters interesting: Emma Bovary, for instance, is not a particularly clever character, you could say she is quite the opposite. it is hinted that irina has become this way because she suffered sexual abuse in her childhood and teenage years.

Now the idea of reversing gender in this sort of power hierarchy isn’t new—I quite enjoyed Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi exploring this in Fra Keeler—but I quite liked how this touches on ideas of “woke culture” and how society will overlook abuse if they find a way to look at it as subversive. The whole absolute power corrupts absolutely maxim may come to mind, though Clark is also careful to show how just because this story is about abuse doesn’t mean that all kink or dom/sub relationships are inherently abusive and harmful.

I could train a camera on a man and look at him like a man looks at a woman; boys, too, could be objects of desire. There is a storyline involving, you guessed it, ‘boy parts’ that was just a rip off from American Psycho (in that we are meant to question the veracity of irina’s recollection of these violent events). Irina is the perfect balance of antiheroine and villain, a protagonist who reflects the reader in glittering little shards as often as she repulses. There’s this expectation that women should be nurturing and comforting, even in books, and that’s absurd,” she adds, citing a Goodreads review of Melissa Broder’s The Pisces, which criticised the book because the protagonist was mean to a dog.