Annie on My Mind, by Nancy Garden (review)

When I confessed to Jade that I had never read any F/F romance, I guess she must have felt sorry for me, for the next thing she did was send me a PDF copy of Annie on My Mind. Of course it took me over a year before I actually got around to reading. But woman, was it worth the wait!

Liza, now a freshman at MIT, remembers what happened during her high school senior year. It all starts with a girl… Annie. They meet inside the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where Liza searches inspiration for her project, and Annie sings aimlessly. Besides being both seventeen, and not relating easily to other people their age, the girls have little in common. Liza is from Brooklyn Heights, where she attends a private school in which she has been elected president of the student body. Annie, of Italian descent, lives in a shabby neighbourhood with her parents and grandma, and goes to a public school. Liza wants to become an architect, Annie, a singer. Yet opposites attract, and they soon form a deep friendship… or one might as well call it love.

A big part of the novel is taken up by Liza’s troubles at school, which start when she fails to report one of her classmates for piercing ears in the lavatory. Apparently random and meaningless, the incident snowballs in the context of Foster Academy’s financial difficulties. In order to raise money as well as attract new students, the school must indeed present a pristine image. The student body president’s conduct especially cannot be anything less than irreproachable… I think you see where this is heading.

Annie on My Mind certainly deserves to be called in equal part young adult, romance, and lesbian fiction. The way the three are interwoven within one plot may in fact be this novel’s greatest achievement. In Liza and Annie’s story, their being high school students, their being in love and their being lesbians cannot be separated. Things happen the way they happen exactly because they are all three things at once. Better yet: each of these three facts is admirably portrayed. Being in trouble with the high school hierarchy as a good student? Been there. Liza’s experience perfectly conveys the alienation one feels as a teenager, regardless of one’s sexual orientation.

We didn’t really talk much about being gay; most of the time we just talked about ourselves.
We were what seemed important then, not some label. The day the first snow fell was a Saturday and Annie and I called each other up at exactly the same moment, over and over again, tying our phones with busy signals for ten minutes. I don’t remember which of us got through first, but around an hour later we were both running through Central Park like a couple of maniacs, making snow angels and pelting each other with snowballs.

- Annie on My Mind, Nancy Garden (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1982)

Parts of the book (and maybe you could add, the whole story) sounded a little like The Homosexual Experience 101. By which I mean, things are described exactly the way such things are usually and typically described, not in fiction, but in general whenever we’re talking about homosexuality. But then, why wouldn’t they be? These “typical descriptions” must come from somewhere, and in this respect Ms. Garden’s novel offers an engaging greater picture for all these elements to fit in. Although I’ve read it a dozen times, seeing it within the context of the full story sheds a decidedly fresh light on the matter.

That was the worst thing, another thing I’m never going to be able to forget even though I want to. It was as if everyone were assuming that love had nothing to do with any of this, that it was just “an indulgence of carnal appetites”―I think Ms. Baxter actually used those words.

- Annie on My Mind, Nancy Garden (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1982)

Also, the feeling of repetition (which possibly wasn’t there when the novel was first published, in 1982) may be said to carry a meaning of its own. In the last part, Annie on My Mind becomes the story of how genuine love between two persons can be turned into a caricature by others; how the two only protagonists in that love story are robbed of their agency, how the meaning of their own love is taken away from them. As everybody else jumps in to appropriate their private life, their relationship ceases to be what they make of it. It becomes a case. Garden shows all the nuances in the many reactions Liza and Annie have to face, yet they seem to have one thing in common: misunderstanding.

“There was one night when June and I slept in the same bed. At her house, it was. And we―we kissed each other. And then for a while we pretended one of us was a boy―until it got so―so silly and we got so giggly we stopped. Honey, lots of girls do that kind of thing. Boys, too. Maybe boys more than girls. It doesn’t mean anything unless―well, I don’t suppose I have to draw any pictures, you’re nearly grown up.”

- Annie on My Mind, Nancy Garden (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1982)

Just read that last line twice and tell me if there is a clearer way to express both the invisibilisation of lesbian sex, and the o so erroneous belief that sex is an only-physical urge/act (a belief which directly implies another mistake: that love is a platonic emotion). As a heterosexual―by which I don’t mean to emphasize that my experience is different, as much as that it belongs to the dominant/default discourse―I would lie if I said that this book hasn’t opened up a few more blind spots in my understanding of the gay experience. I cried, too. Maybe everyone needs a Homosexuality 101 course. I know I really want to recommend this book to every person who hasn’t had the chance to read it yet… Any more F/F romance recs, Jade?

Are you familiar with lesbian fiction? Homosexual romance? What do you like (or dislike) about it? Any personal thoughts on Annie on My Mind?

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