Girls Can Kiss Now
Essays
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4.2 • 19 Ratings
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
“Wickedly funny and heartstoppingly vulnerable…every page twinkles with brilliance.” —Refinery29
Perfect for fans of Samantha Irby and Trick Mirror, a hilarious, whip-smart collection of personal essays exploring the intersection of queerness, pop culture, the internet, and identity, introducing one of the most undeniably original new voices today.
Jill Gutowitz’s life—for better and worse—has always been on a collision course with pop culture. There’s the time the FBI showed up at her door because of something she tweeted about Game of Thrones. The pop songs that have been the soundtrack to the worst moments of her life. And of course, the pivotal day when Orange Is the New Black hit the airwaves and broke down the door to Jill’s own sexuality. In these honest examinations of identity, desire, and self-worth, Jill explores perhaps the most monumental cultural shift of our lifetimes: the mainstreaming of lesbian culture. Dusting off her own personal traumas and artifacts of her not-so-distant youth she examines how pop culture acts as a fun house mirror reflecting and refracting our values—always teaching, distracting, disappointing, and revealing us.
Girls Can Kiss Now is a fresh and intoxicating blend of personal stories, sharp observations, and laugh-out-loud humor. This timely collection of essays helps us make sense of our collective pop-culture past even as it points the way toward a joyous, uproarious, near—and very queer—future.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Journalist Gutowitz debuts with an incisive and funny collection of essays on coming of age as a queer woman in the early 2000s. In "One Day, You'll All Be Gay," she writes of Lindsay Lohan and Samantha Ronson's 2008 relationship—they were "ravenously exploited"—and how she was affected by the narrative of a queer female sexuality centered on drugs and mental illness: "I remember thinking: I'm a good student. I come from a great family... I'm not some weak-minded chump, able to be indoctrinated by lesbianism." In "Kill the Creator of Entourage in Your Head," she reflects on coming to terms with her sexuality while watching Orange Is the New Black; "The Ten Most Important Sapphic Paparazzi Photos in Modern History" lists "Cara Delevingne and Michelle Rodriguez vaping" and "Janelle Monáe and Lupita Nyong'o grinding at Met Gala afterparty" as key cultural moments; and the slightly more somber "The Beast" considers the superficiality of celebrities through their asinine tweets sent during the pandemic—Kim Kardashian, for example, showed off one of her 14 Friesian horses. Gutowitz blends candid reflections on the experience of being closeted with witty analysis on how the media affects one's perception of the world. Fans of the personal essay will be eager to see what Gutowitz does next.
