The only thing more horrifying than perceiving one’s self is being perceived by others, and Jenny Fran Davis explores both actions with an audacious and tender wit. Which would be fine if she had any independence or agency at all that wasn't literally a sexual performance for the white characters in the book. When Jesse and Darcy collaborate an ill-fated livestream performance, a complex web of infatuation and jealousy emerges, sending Sasha down a spiral of destructive rage that threatens each couple’s future. The book has some interesting things to say about generational changes and trans identity, but what annoyed me is that it sees itself as somehow edgelord-y, when it's mainly about the protagonist being an anti-feminist idiot - and I don't mean the outward presentation (who am I to comment on that, a woman who owns three pink coats and a concerning amount of shoes and handbags? Maybe I just don't understand this side of queer culture (I am queer myself), but I could not relate to any of these characters and felt very much like an outsider, looking in on a secret queer club I'm not allowed to be in (and frankly wouldn't want to be).

Her lesbian boyfriend, who is on T and uses he/him and she/her pronouns interchangeably, is at the whims of Sasha's projections, that range from strict gender roles, to non-consensual-roleplay during sex. While I can’t deign to speak to the universal dyke experience either, I do think had the protagonist had tried to understand or relate any other kind of lesbian relationship dynamics, this book would have had a more realistic view on 21st century lesbianism. But this book is purporting to, and that’s what’s often enraging (especially through the first 3/4 before shit gets moving plot-wise). Jenny Fran Davis is a real troublemaker, and Dykette is my favorite kind of trouble —sexy, messy, full of gossip and glitter, and cunning, and thus of course profoundly revealing about our strange times.

I’ve dated lost bois who aren’t looking for a girlfriend or even a wife, but a mother figure to cook and clean and organize their lives for them while they fuck other people on the side.

It has a lot to say about the generational divides, the difference between a 20-something queer person and a 40-something queer person can be ridiculously vast and Davis spends much of the novel turning this over and looking at it from angle after angle. But she contorted anew, refocused the phone on her face (now visibly strained with determination), and humbled herself before the technology of the day—which everyone else used for purposes mundane and mercenary, but which Sasha was using for the highest purpose: that of seduction. Sasha playacts at adulthood when she tries to force her boyfriend to propose and commit to one day co-parenting children, before figuring out a little too late that that’s not the way she’ll get what she wants — if not that force isn’t exactly the best way to love someone. Lou seems the most comfortable with themselves, and Jules is the most pretentious, like she always has to try too hard. Jenny Fran Davis shows up to our interview with, as promised, a prime piece of book swag: a white baseball cap with Dykette, the name of her forthcoming novel out May 16, in hot pink cursive along the front.

There was so much detail for such meaningless things and it dragged on and on (I don't care about every detail of each characters' outfit and what brands they are wearing, etc). A hilarious, astute, and captivating tour of a young femme’s interior life over the course of one long weekend upstate. Those depictions, which are sort of a mix of fiction and nonfiction, really inspired me; I’m rediscovering books from the 1970s like Ruby Fruit Jungle, and authors from the ’80s and ’90s like Michelle Tea, and even more contemporary ones, like Sarah Thankam Mathews’s book All This Could Be Different.