Double Teenage
Format:Paperback
Publisher:BookThug
Published:24th Mar '16
Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back
Double Teenage tells the story of two young teenagers (best friends, Celine and Julie) who are coming of age in the 1990s along the US-Mexico border--a place where nothing seems to happen, but only because what counts as 'something' is defined by far-off centres of power. In their small, desert town and small-scale life, they become a twin pair. Through their love of theatre, they find their way into a wider world, rich with opportunity, but at the same time, dense with situations of peril and violence. This unrelenting novel shines a spotlight on the paradoxes of Western culture -- obsessed with depictions of fantasy sexual violence, while at the same time, wilfully blind to the many ways in which desire and hurt twine together in real life; where angry, emotional, and loving girls have been told time and again that they overthink things; where survival goes hand-in-hand with trauma and witnessing; where art, books, movies, TV, and plays work to both shield us from reality and also help us to face it, and powerful healing rituals can be made out of everyday material goods -- hoodie sweatshirts, homemade alcoholic punch, joints, and blood pacts. In this way, Double Teenage ultimately offers a way through violence into an emotionally alive place beyond the trap of girlhood. Informed and influenced by the films of David Lynch, Agnes Varda, Chris Marker, Jacques Rivette, Murphy has developed an emotional dialogue in Double Teenage, one that wrestles with the borders of our bodies, our countries, and our realities. The borderlands (the US/Mexican and the Canadian/US) in this novel become gendered, performative spaces that are hard and soft, depending on who is trying to cross. Though the girls move away from the Southwest to Vancouver and Chicago, and gain entry into rarefied academic and artistic circles, they discover that the violence and solitude of the borderlands are still stuck within them. In drawing comparisons to Sheila Heti's How Should a Person Be and Chris Kraus's Summer of Hate, the harrowing narrative in Double Teenage will speak particularly to an audience of 'Under 40' women who are radical, possibly over-educated, if perhaps precariously employed. Art audiences, as well as people interested in literary fiction and criticism, will also be drawn to...
"Double Teenage seems like the definitive book of The Young Girl as defined by Tiqqun. It's also a definitive book about NAFTA, the Ciudad Juarez femicides, spectacular serial killings, and media's comforting lull." --Chris Kraus for The Millions
"Murphy seems to suggest this interpersonal connection that endures despite external and internalized misogyny is magic and is its own dizzying and overlapping network of survival and creation. In a culture mostly interested in the spectacle of dead girls, Double Teenage is a formally provocative counter spell to the facts of violence." --Adele Barclay for The Rusty Toque
"Brilliant and necessary." --Jade Colbert, The Globe and Mail
"Double Teenage is undoubtedly a feminist text, but it isn't one that offers a pretty picture of its characters overcoming male-dominated systems of power. The book ends with that cryptic line: "This is a spell for getting out of girlhood alive." Either this is Murphy's metaphor for the entire book and the instructions are hidden within its pages, or it is a nihilistic gesture to show that the systems of patriarchy are embedded so deeply within every aspect of our society that only something as impossible as magic can fix it." --Shannon Tien, Maisonneuve
"...this is a novel gesturing outwards, pointing to the world, using the world and its threads to build something new, offering structure, frameworks, where we hadn't seen such a thing before. Daring to state that girlhood is significant, even if it's a stage, and even if it's a stage." --Kerry Clare, Pickle Me This
"Joni Murphy's narrative straddles the line between a character-driven story and a treatise to be discussed, something living and breathing and something only understood from afar. There is more than one way to look at it, more than one valid formula." --Buried in Print
Double Teenage is a stunning first novel, moving with stealth and intelligence against the North American landscape. -- Chris Kraus, author of I Love Dick
"Joni Murphy speaks to us directly. She speaks to us from a place of borders, of countries, and of languages that are strange to her and in need of reinvention. Through her ear and her eye, through her transmissions from these dusklands, we recognize something actual, an event or place, but cross-examined, rendered and remixed. Sometimes theatrical, sometimes cinematic, always urgent and painted on a broad canvas, unafraid of the depth of each landscape, of the mountains that we cannot see that lie beyond the mountains that we can. Her monologues follow the flow of thought -- visual, critical, poetic, nostalgic. She speaks to where we are now -- when the 'we' is the individual and the body politic, in this historical moment, where this marginal place, through the thought of her writing, becomes the centre." -- Matthew Goulish, founding member of the performance groups Goat Island and Every House Has a Door
ISBN: 9781771662130
Dimensions: 203mm x 2mm x 132mm
Weight: 270g
200 pages