Queen Is in the Garbage

"Deft, defiant . . . accurate.” —New York Times Book Review

Shifting seamlessly between past and present, consciousness and dreams, Lila Karp explores the conflicted psyche of thirty-two-year-old Harriet Battenberg as she inventories her life during a fourteen-hour labor. Wrenching flashbacks recall embittering conflicts with her mother, unfulfilling relationships with men, a miscarriage, and an abortion. Harriet’s struggle above all is to understand how her perception of womanhood has brought her to this moment of personal crisis.

Lila Karp halts time in the midst of exploring the psychological and sexual entanglements of a woman’s experience. Her wit and distinct literary style make hers a unique voice among writers from the 1960s U.S. feminist movement, a voice that still resounds today for everyone fighting to find themselves and write their own histories and futures. The Queen is in the Garbage is a shocking and absorbing story that uses a feminist perspective to deconstruct fundamental questions of womanhood, autonomy, and the very essence of human existence.

Lila Karp was a former director of Princeton University's Women's Center and a codirector of The Institute for the Study of Women and Men at the University of Southern California. She taught literature, film, and feminist theory in women's studies programs at many U.S. universities. At the time of her death in 2008, she was teaching existential psychotherapy at Antioch University in Los Angeles.