Janice Lee’s experimental novel Daughter is more of a poem than it is a linear story. “It’s written in prose, but it’s written in prose fragments,” Lee tells us. “On some of the pages there’ll be paragraphs of text, but there will be a lot of white space. There is a loose narrative. There’s a daughter, and she’s wandering in the desert, and she comes across the body of an octopus, and she believes it to be the body of a dead god, so she performs an autopsy on it. But I’m working more with conceptual ideas about phenomenology and consciousness.”
You can’t have a daughter without a mother, and the daughter/mother relationship is a focus of the story. Also present is a theme about monsters, what defines them and who they are. One reviewer of Daughter noted that just a few letters separate the words “mother” and “monster.” “I didn’t make that very direct connection between mother and monster, but yeah, it’s definitely a part of the project,” Lee says. “One thing I was thinking about was that in the West, we don’t really have any archetypes for looking at daughters in relationship to their mothers. That’s something that I’m interested in.” Lee appears along with author Anna Joy Springer (The Vicious Red Relic) at 7:30 p.m. Kaboom Books, 3116 Houston Avenue.
Mon., Aug. 13, 7:30 p.m., 2012
This article appears in Jun 14-20, 2012.