The Girl with the Black Lipstick

Mary Biddinger’s The Girl with the Black Lipstick isn’t simply a blast from the past—it is the past—the year 1999 brought back to life in all its Twitter-less, text-less glory, courtesy of the narrator Mary Van Pelt, who blends nostalgia and cynicism in appropriate doses. A graduate student of English, Mary—along with her unnamed and exotic “Roommate”—explores the bars and streets and beaches of Chicago in between enduring the frequent absurdities of a grad school creative writing workshop. As in much of Biddinger’s work, the narrative is never linear, a straight-line journey from A to B along bland interstates, but feels instead like an excursion along the backroads of life where all the good scenery is, served up throughout this book in stunningly original images and observations. There’s an undertone of wistfulness for what’s gone, but that, too, is leveled by a dose of reality and the irony endowed by the wisdom of hindsight. “In the old days,” the narrator notes, “we both felt fragile, but we were actually at our best, an epiphany that makes me want to slit the throat of every ravioli in the pot.” This is a story that feels perfectly suited to the novella-in-flash, a reach back to grab the fragments of who we were in the final year of the twentieth century, to hold them to the light in an attempt to understand what peculiar threads connected us.

–Sarah Freligh, author of Hereafter and Sad Math

In The Girl with the Black Lipstick, Mary Biddinger captures the unexpected nostalgia for a time few living through it believe they’ll ever miss: the first precarious years of adulthood. In the age of The Spice Girls, rollerblades, Tickle Me Elmo, and Trainspotting, Mary Van Pelt is a new graduate student stomping and slinking through 90s Chicago. Powered by the wild confidence and crushing self-doubt of the still young, she anticipates her future fame and the academic accolades sure to come. In a series of linked flash pieces, Biddinger manifests the distinct mix of closeness, claustrophobia, and competition that shapes academia and its inexperienced acolytes. Moving from lecture halls to dance floors to the floor itself, laid-out after eating what may or may not have been fiddleheads, an eccentric cast of characters divide their time partying and struggling to make ends meet, failing and succeeding as they stagger into their adult lives. Told in vignettes full of regret and revelation, The Girl with the Black Lipstick is a wry celebration of how we become who we are.

–Jenny Irish, author of Hatch