Apples & Oranges: My Journey Through Sexual Identity - Hardcover

Clausen, Jan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0395827523 ISBN 13: 9780395827529

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin, 1999

Synopsis

After more than a decade of "marriage" to a woman with whom she was raising a daughter, Jan Clausen fell in love with a man, stunning herself and the lesbian community to which she had been intimately connected. The experience was, she writes, "like deliberately embarking on a sea cruise off the edge of a flat Earth." In her luminous and affecting memoir, Clausen charts the trajectory of her sexual life -- from her first kiss to her later loves -- and offers a stunning critique of society's insistence on yoking identity to desire. In the 1950s Pacific Northwest, Clausen grew up in a family in which extramarital sex, swearing, and spicy foods were verboten. In the sixties, she embraced the (hetero)sexual revolution, consorting with various adolescent Lotharios and failing miserably in her effort to become a topless dancer during her summer break from Reed College. After leaving school, she joined an experimental community, where she met her first woman lover. But it was amid New York's dynamic feminist milieu in the 1970s that she "crossed the pass of love" and fell for Leslie Kaplow, also a writer and activist. As a couple, they immersed themselves in the city's vibrant literary sisterhood and eventually launched their own literary magazine. In time, however, Clausen grew restless in her personal relationship and uneasy with what she calls People in Groups, those enforcers of ideological purity. Through her travels, she discovered sweet escape from her familiar world, especially through her activism in Nicaragua, whose war-ravaged streets would provide the backdrop for her unpardonable act: falling in love with a West Indian male lawyer. Deeply felt, gorgeously written, Apples and Oranges is a testament to the powers and perils of desire. It is also the story of one woman's mourning for the community that cast her out and a dazzling examination of the ways in which we all search for identity. Rejecting all efforts at sexual sorting, including the label "bisexual," for her own journey, Clausen arrives at an understanding of sexual attraction in which both likeness and difference emerge as deeply erotic. Whatever our passions, this groundbreaking work will never again let us consider the received categories of sexuality in the same light.

About this title

Review

When Jan Clausen, long-time lesbian activist and poet, left her lover of 12 years for a man, she was exiled, as she puts it, "from the Garden of Dykedom." Her social circle, her reputation, her writing career--all hinged on her public identity as a lesbian. "Public" rather than "sexual": Clausen casts her dilemma not in personal but in social terms, remarking at one point that people want to know "which version of me is real." In this elegant, sharply focused memoir, she recalls her early sexual life with men, her absorption in radical politics of the late 1960s and early 1970s, and her gradual cultivation of "protolesbian sentiments." As her feminist poetry gained notice, Clausen found "the promise of inclusion in a tiny, woman-only avant-garde more enticing than membership in an undifferentiated throng." Although she presents this book as an argument against the either/or model of sexuality, it is more an elegy for that lost sense of inclusion in a beleaguered minority. A thought-provoking and seductive work. --Regina Marler

About the Author

Jan Clausen teaches writing and literature at Eugene Lang College, a division of the New School in New York City. Her eight previous books include the novels Sinking, Stealing, and The Prosperine Papers. She lives in New York.

Edition details

• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0395827523
• ISBN 13: 9780395827529
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 253