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A review by sweddy65
Stray City by Chelsey Johnson
4.0
In many ways, this story seems universal to the lesbian experience, although Chelsey Johnson's character Andrea Morales is half a generation younger than I am, from a different small town, and with a whole different set of experiences.
Andy left her small Nebraska farm town for Reed College where she started to become herself. At home, she could never be herself because her family was small town Catholic and expected her to follow a particular path: college, marriage to a man, children who are baptized and raised in the church.
Instead, she found her people, her family. Andy tells us, "I made myself brave and my new friends made me braver," and I thought, "Yes." Isn't this my story and the story of the poor, queer marginal people I knew, not in the 1990s, but in the 1980s.
When Andrea comes out to her family, during a winter break visit to Nebraska, they take her to her priest who wants to send her to conversion therapy. With the help of a sympathetic sister, she flees. She could not afford to stay at Reed without her family's support, but her friends help her build a life of her own that is financially marginal but rich in music and art and community.
Her Pride is a later Pride, one with a separate Dyke March, but still: "Pride was a reminder that our numbers were greater than we knew, and the strength therein, etc.; also, that queer people could be an unoriginal and exasperating as any people. We fought for our humanity to be recognized, and indeed, there it was, unflattering shorts and all."
Later, at a makeshift club, Andrea thinks: "I had no safety net, no savings, no insurance, no future, but I did have this: this room, this feeling, these people." There is that feeling that I think many of us have had, of being so financially marginal that you push it down and try not to worry, but also feeling as if you have finally found a home and your people.
One night, hurting post-breakup with Flynn, and lonely, she ends up in a club on a bar stool next to Ryan Coates who is the drummer for the Cold Shoulder. When they leave the bar together, Andrea feeling vulnerable after seeing Flynn and Vivian (another ex and good friend) together, ends up in a doorway, making out with Ryan despite the fact that act goes against her very lesbian grain.
Andrea keeps thinking about the kiss and, despite the fact that she has no desire for a relationship with a man and, in fact, it feels foreign and wrong in many ways, through conversation and laughter and Scrabble Ryan woos her and they end up in a kind of relationship, one that Ryan desperately wants and that Andrea is always holding slightly away from herself, one that she seems to always be trying to leave behind but keeps coming back to.
Andrea now has a different kind of hidden life. The first one was in her Nebraska youth, but now, as part of the Lesbian Mafia, she hides Ryan and her relationship. She believes she has stepped away from her sleeping with him and throws herself into putting up an art show that she and her friends had been planning.
When it goes up, so much of the scene made me laugh out loud. The earnest lesbians who, politically, believe that judgment is patriarchal, so they let everything, even the bad art up. "'Oh god, I can't even look at that wall,' Meena said, turning her head away. 'I actually can't.' It was a display of feathers and bones and paintings on leather arranged in a quasi-Native American aesthetic. the artist was, naturally, a white woman, the girlfriend of an organizer."
Ryan shows up at the show and Andrea tries to explain to him, that this--this exhibit, this space--is her home and that her sleeping with him was a "tour" or an aberration. That hits home even further when she sees an exhibit she hadn't seen before about the murder of Brandon Teena, a murder that took place in Andrea's home state. The day before the exhibit opened, although they didn't know it yet, Matthew Shepard's body had been found. "All I knew was that for all our art, for all our writing, for all our self-defense workshops, for all our banding together in our cities and oases, queer survival was still not guaranteed." Those sentences hit so close to home, and I think they still would for the queer folks in the 2010s.
But Andrea is still lonely, and so she ends up back with Ryan. She realizes that the world looks at the two of them and doesn't flinch. She meets his friends, and likes many of them, "But I never stopped being aware of my hands or the sound of my own voice. I missed my friends and the relief of being unexplained and understood."
Always meaning to break it off, and actually breaking it off more than once, Andrea finds herself back with Ryan, and then pregnant.
The disapproval of her friends, for this hidden relationship with a man, is stunning and hurtful, but also so true.
Andrea decides to not get an abortion, to keep the child and to raise the child in her community, in a different world from the one she grew up in. Ryan agrees to help, and moves in, and they continue their relationship--overlapping and more-or-less together.
One day, Ryan goes for a drive and never comes back, ending up in Bemidji, Minnesota. Maybe he would have returned in Andrea had been less ambivalent, if she had begged, but she doesn't.
The book then leaps forward ten years and there is Lucia, the wonderful girl child being raised in a community of people who love her and love her mother. Her mother's lover, Beatriz, is getting married to their friend Topher so that Beatriz can stay in the country with Andrea and Lucia.
In preparing for the wedding, Lucia finds a Cold Shoulder album in the attic and realizes that the guitar on the cover is her guitar and she follows the clues and eventually finds out that the guitar came from Ryan, who is her father,and, more than anything, for her 10th birthday, she wants to meet him.
The book ends with the meeting. Beatriz who is afraid of being left, realizes that Lucia won't abandon her for her father, that she is fascinated by her father and may end up with some kind of relationship with him, but that Lucia loves Beatriz, that Beatriz is Lucia's. Andrea loses some of her fear of losing Lucia, that Ryan doesn't pose a threat to that essential unit, that he will not try to snatch her away, and, whatever Lucia decides, it won't be that she doesn't love her mother. And Ryan remains a little shadowy, still, but clear that he has a life that suits him.
This is a story that will reverberate in those of us who are queer and marginal, but who have found ways not just to survive but to thrive, who have remade family and our relationship to the world. It is beautiful and often funny.
Read this.
Andy left her small Nebraska farm town for Reed College where she started to become herself. At home, she could never be herself because her family was small town Catholic and expected her to follow a particular path: college, marriage to a man, children who are baptized and raised in the church.
Instead, she found her people, her family. Andy tells us, "I made myself brave and my new friends made me braver," and I thought, "Yes." Isn't this my story and the story of the poor, queer marginal people I knew, not in the 1990s, but in the 1980s.
When Andrea comes out to her family, during a winter break visit to Nebraska, they take her to her priest who wants to send her to conversion therapy. With the help of a sympathetic sister, she flees. She could not afford to stay at Reed without her family's support, but her friends help her build a life of her own that is financially marginal but rich in music and art and community.
Her Pride is a later Pride, one with a separate Dyke March, but still: "Pride was a reminder that our numbers were greater than we knew, and the strength therein, etc.; also, that queer people could be an unoriginal and exasperating as any people. We fought for our humanity to be recognized, and indeed, there it was, unflattering shorts and all."
Later, at a makeshift club, Andrea thinks: "I had no safety net, no savings, no insurance, no future, but I did have this: this room, this feeling, these people." There is that feeling that I think many of us have had, of being so financially marginal that you push it down and try not to worry, but also feeling as if you have finally found a home and your people.
One night, hurting post-breakup with Flynn, and lonely, she ends up in a club on a bar stool next to Ryan Coates who is the drummer for the Cold Shoulder. When they leave the bar together, Andrea feeling vulnerable after seeing Flynn and Vivian (another ex and good friend) together, ends up in a doorway, making out with Ryan despite the fact that act goes against her very lesbian grain.
Andrea keeps thinking about the kiss and, despite the fact that she has no desire for a relationship with a man and, in fact, it feels foreign and wrong in many ways, through conversation and laughter and Scrabble Ryan woos her and they end up in a kind of relationship, one that Ryan desperately wants and that Andrea is always holding slightly away from herself, one that she seems to always be trying to leave behind but keeps coming back to.
Andrea now has a different kind of hidden life. The first one was in her Nebraska youth, but now, as part of the Lesbian Mafia, she hides Ryan and her relationship. She believes she has stepped away from her sleeping with him and throws herself into putting up an art show that she and her friends had been planning.
When it goes up, so much of the scene made me laugh out loud. The earnest lesbians who, politically, believe that judgment is patriarchal, so they let everything, even the bad art up. "'Oh god, I can't even look at that wall,' Meena said, turning her head away. 'I actually can't.' It was a display of feathers and bones and paintings on leather arranged in a quasi-Native American aesthetic. the artist was, naturally, a white woman, the girlfriend of an organizer."
Ryan shows up at the show and Andrea tries to explain to him, that this--this exhibit, this space--is her home and that her sleeping with him was a "tour" or an aberration. That hits home even further when she sees an exhibit she hadn't seen before about the murder of Brandon Teena, a murder that took place in Andrea's home state. The day before the exhibit opened, although they didn't know it yet, Matthew Shepard's body had been found. "All I knew was that for all our art, for all our writing, for all our self-defense workshops, for all our banding together in our cities and oases, queer survival was still not guaranteed." Those sentences hit so close to home, and I think they still would for the queer folks in the 2010s.
But Andrea is still lonely, and so she ends up back with Ryan. She realizes that the world looks at the two of them and doesn't flinch. She meets his friends, and likes many of them, "But I never stopped being aware of my hands or the sound of my own voice. I missed my friends and the relief of being unexplained and understood."
Always meaning to break it off, and actually breaking it off more than once, Andrea finds herself back with Ryan, and then pregnant.
The disapproval of her friends, for this hidden relationship with a man, is stunning and hurtful, but also so true.
Andrea decides to not get an abortion, to keep the child and to raise the child in her community, in a different world from the one she grew up in. Ryan agrees to help, and moves in, and they continue their relationship--overlapping and more-or-less together.
One day, Ryan goes for a drive and never comes back, ending up in Bemidji, Minnesota. Maybe he would have returned in Andrea had been less ambivalent, if she had begged, but she doesn't.
The book then leaps forward ten years and there is Lucia, the wonderful girl child being raised in a community of people who love her and love her mother. Her mother's lover, Beatriz, is getting married to their friend Topher so that Beatriz can stay in the country with Andrea and Lucia.
In preparing for the wedding, Lucia finds a Cold Shoulder album in the attic and realizes that the guitar on the cover is her guitar and she follows the clues and eventually finds out that the guitar came from Ryan, who is her father,and, more than anything, for her 10th birthday, she wants to meet him.
The book ends with the meeting. Beatriz who is afraid of being left, realizes that Lucia won't abandon her for her father, that she is fascinated by her father and may end up with some kind of relationship with him, but that Lucia loves Beatriz, that Beatriz is Lucia's. Andrea loses some of her fear of losing Lucia, that Ryan doesn't pose a threat to that essential unit, that he will not try to snatch her away, and, whatever Lucia decides, it won't be that she doesn't love her mother. And Ryan remains a little shadowy, still, but clear that he has a life that suits him.
This is a story that will reverberate in those of us who are queer and marginal, but who have found ways not just to survive but to thrive, who have remade family and our relationship to the world. It is beautiful and often funny.
Read this.