Double Teenage

By Joni Murphy

Book Overview

A Globe and Mail Best Book of 2016

Double Teenage tells the story of Celine and Julie, two girls coming of age in the 1990s in a desert town close to the US-Mexico border. Starting from their shared love of theatre, the girls move into a wider world that shimmers with intellectual and artistic possibility, but at the same time, is dense with threat.

This unrelenting novel shines a spotlight on paradoxes of Western culture. It asks impossible questions about the media's obsession with sexual violence as it twins with a social unwillingness to look at real pain. It asks what it feels like to be a girl, simultaneously a being and a thing, feeling in a marketplace. Wherever they are--whether in a dance club in El Paso or an art lecture in Vancouver--these characters brush against maddening contradiction and concealed brutality.

This is a portrait of the recent past, seen through the cloudy lens of now. Murphy traces the lives of friends struggling within self-destructive realities. Part bildungsroman, part performance, part passionate essay, part magic spell, Double Teenage ultimately offers a way to see through violence into an emotionally alive place beyond the myriad traps of girlhood.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1771662131
• ISBN13: 9781771662130
• Release Date: March 2016
• Publisher: Book*hug Press
• Length: 208 Pages
• Weight: 0.63 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.2" x 8.0"