A Woman Determined

"If you want to know what really happened, you ask someone who was there, just like you are doing with me, right?" Swallow replicates the methods of journalism and oral history in this disturbing, posthumously published novel about shifting perceptions. At its outset, Margaret Donovan, founder and former director of a women's health center, is being interviewed for an article about women who've made a difference in Seattle's lesbian community. But the unnamed interviewer quickly takes a back seat to the novel's two narrators: the staunch and hearty Donovan and her attorney, Laura Gilbert, who represents Donovan after she's injured in a car accident. The accident comes at a turning point for both women?Donovan's clinic is in financial peril, and Gilbert is undergoing a crisis of faith about her law practice. Did Donovan mismanage clinic funds? Who was at fault in the accident? Did Donovan resign, or was she forced out of her job at the clinic? In alternating monologues, both women tell the truth as they see it, and make the "interview" a platform from which to address larger issues of justice and personal responsibility. "I needed the ambiguities of real people," says Gilbert. It is precisely these ambiguities that Swallow (Leave a Light On for Me) portrays. Readers looking for the "real" truth will be disappointed: Swallow tries hard to give her paired, conflicting narratives equal weight as their complex, forthright tellers do their best to recount and make meaning from the past they share.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Swallow, a suicide at 42 in 1995, left behind a book with as much gritty edge as its heroines. In the case of Margaret Donovan, accident victim, that grit consists of dogged determination to overcome the pain from a knee injury and surgical complications and to keep going as director of the women's health clinic she started. She suffers emotional pain, too, since her ex-lover, Annie, ran out on her, taking some $50,000 of the clinic's money. Donovan's burned-out case of an attorney, fellow lesbian Laura Gilbert, tries to win the largest possible settlement for her client, but the two miscommunicate as Donovan increasingly pins all her unfulfilled desires on winning a settlement that will somehow make up for all of life's disappointments. Swallow takes a long, withering, yet compassionate look at the possibilities and expectations created and destroyed within the lesbian community as women more desperate than determined pin their hopes and rage on one another as they fight the larger, male-and money-dominated, oppressive society. Whitney Scott

Swallow, editor of The Next Step: Lesbians in Long-Term Recovery (LJ 11/15/95), presents a fictionalized portrait of an urban lesbian feminist community in this posthumously published novel. Margaret, injured in a car accident, is bitter and resentful at what she feels was poor representation by her lawyer, Laura. They tell their stories in alternating chapters. Although both versions of the court case are ostensibly valid, Laura is by far the more sympathetic character, and so her story seems more credible. Both Margaret and Laura are honorable, hardworking women making it in a world that doesn't even accept their existence; no wonder they have such high expectations of their community, one that has generated real social change but that exacts a high toll on the same women who were the trailblazers. Swallow's premise is intriguing, but unfortunately the book is a turgid read. Recommended only for libraries that count a substantial number of political activists among their patrons.?Ina Rimpau, Newark P.L., NJ
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.