Synopses & Reviews
From a bold, sensitive, and shrewd young writer: a hotly anticipated debut novel, about flesh, fear, poverty, privilege, and the sheer and inescapable brutality of love.
In the beginning, there was Tilly: fabulous and free, outrageous and untamable, vulnerable and terrified. Was it the Sixties that did her wrong, or the drugs, or the men, or was it the middle-class upbringing she couldn't abide? As a young woman, she flees home for the hollow neon underworld of Nevada, looking for pure souls and finding nothing but bad habits. She stays away for decades, working the streets and worse, eventually drinking herself to the brink of death in the middle of the desert. One day, after Tilly has spent nearly thirty years without a family, her niece shows up on the doorstep of her dusty trailer.
Stella has been leading her own life of empty promise in New York City. She makes her living booking Botox appointments and national-media appearances for a famous (and famously neurotic) "inspirational" writer by day; she complains about her job at warehouse parties in remote boroughs by night; she waits for her married lover to make time in his schedule to screw her over, softly; and she takes care of her ailing grandmother in Connecticut. Before Stella's grandmother dies, she tells Stella the truth about Tilly, her runaway daughter, and Stella decides to give up the vast and penetrating loneliness of the city to find this lost woman the family had never mentioned.
The Gin Closet unravels the strange and powerful intimacy that forms between Tilly and Stella as they move to San Francisco to make a home with Abe, Tilly's overworked and elusive son. Shifting between the perspectives of both women, the narrative documents the construction of a fragile triangle that eventually breaks under its own weight.
With an uncanny ear for dialogue and a witty, unflinching candor about sex, love, and power, Leslie Jamison reminds us that no matter how unexpected its turns are, this life we're given is all we have: the cruelties that unhinge us, the beauties that clarify us, the addictions that deform us, those fleeting possibilities of grace that fade as quickly as they come. In the words of writer Charles D'Ambrosio, this extraordinary novel teaches us that "history has its way, the body has its way, and the rebellions we believe in leave behind a bleak wisdom, if we're lucky -- and defeat, if we're not." The Gin Closet marks the debut of a stunning new talent in fiction.
Review
"Devastating...astonishing...a story of love and ruin in the American West...it is a book that finds beauty in dysfunction- and, in doing so, gives us one of the truest and most devastating depictions of alcoholism to be had in some time...exquisite prose...droll...a tour de force." —Karen Brady, Buffalo News
Review
“Life is raw in Leslie Jamison’s astonishing first novel, a story of love and ruin in the American West…it is a book that finds beauty in dysfunction—and, in doing so, gives us one of the truest and most devastating depictions of alcoholism to be had in some time…
The Gin Closet is nothing short of a tour de force.”
—Buffalo News
Review
“Keenly felt...Redemption, finds Jamison, like love, is rarely pure or unambiguous.”
—Vogue
Review
“relentless…Jamison’s language is densely figurative….providing insightful, beautifully written metaphors….The most interesting aspect of the novel is the difference between Stella and Tilly’s accounts of the same events, which show the ways the women misread and misunderstand each other, the hurts accidentally inflicted, and annoyances poorly concealed.”
—Emma Hamilton, Bust
Review
"Jamison creates emotionally complex scenes of harsh revelation in language as scorching as the gin Tilly downs...Jamison's novel of solitary confinement within one's pain is hauntingly beautiful."
—Donna Seaman, Booklist
Review
"keenly frames the emotional mysteries of recovering alcoholic Tilly Rudolph and her niece Stella...Jamison's voice is resoundingly unique, her prose both raw and precise, fully attuned to poetry without ever rescinding an energetic narrative impulse...Of particular importance is the onlique beauty and taut sensuality of Jamison's language and imagery...Jamison is not just marching to the beat of her own drum. She is banging out a brutal, ecstatic symphony upon it.
The Gin Closet dares readers to understand how and why we abrade our bodies, ourselves, to manifest the incommunicable to one another."
—Nora Nahid Khan, New Haven Advocate
Review
"The Gin Closet is no escapist fantasy but a slow and steady heartbreak.
Review
"Leslie Jamison seems intent on finding the beauty behind loss and desperation...Jamison is no coward, that's for sure.
Review
"...a brutally honest protrait of a woman in crisis...Anyone who has dealt with alcoholism in their own family will no doubt recognize this battle...
The Gin Closet will make you more emphathetic to the people in your lives."
—Bookchickdi
Review
"The Gin Closet is no escapist fantasy but a slow and steady heartbreak. It is also exquisitely beautiful. Jamison writes like a poet, her imagery breathtaking, her sentences unfurling unpredictably, to the novel's devastating end."
—San Francisco Chronicle
Review
"Leslie Jamison seems intent on finding the beauty behind loss and desperation...Jamison is no coward, that's for sure. Like Mary Gaitskill, she writes courageously about disease, sex and perils of the flesh without flinching...brave and bracing."
—Time Out New York
Synopsis
Jamison's auspicious debut novel is told through the voices of a young woman and her alcoholic aunt.
Synopsis
From a bold, sensitive, and shrewd young writer: a hotly anticipated debut novel, about flesh, fear, poverty, privilege, and the sheer and inescapable brutality of love.
In the beginning, there was Tilly: fabulous and free, outrageous and untamable, vulnerable and terrified. Was it the Sixties that did her wrong, or the drugs, or the men, or was it the middle-class upbringing she couldn't abide? As a young woman, she flees home for the hollow neon underworld of Nevada, looking for pure souls and finding nothing but bad habits. She stays away for decades, working the streets and worse, eventually drinking herself to the brink of death in the middle of the desert. One day, after Tilly has spent nearly thirty years without a family, her niece shows up on the doorstep of her dusty trailer.
Stella has been leading her own life of empty promise in New York City. She makes her living booking Botox appointments and national-media appearances for a famous (and famously neurotic) "inspirational" writer by day; she complains about her job at warehouse parties in remote boroughs by night; she waits for her married lover to make time in his schedule to screw her over, softly; and she takes care of her ailing grandmother in Connecticut. Before Stella's grandmother dies, she tells Stella the truth about Tilly, her runaway daughter, and Stella decides to give up the vast and penetrating loneliness of the city to find this lost woman the family had never mentioned.
The Gin Closet unravels the strange and powerful intimacy that forms between Tilly and Stella as they move to San Francisco to make a home with Abe, Tilly's overworked and elusive son. Shifting between the perspectives of both women, the narrative documents the construction of a fragile triangle that eventually breaks under its own weight.
With an uncanny ear for dialogue and a witty, unflinching candor about sex, love, and power, Leslie Jamison reminds us that no matter how unexpected its turns are, this life we're given is all we have: the cruelties that unhinge us, the beauties that clarify us, the addictions that deform us, those fleeting possibilities of grace that fade as quickly as they come. In the words of writer Charles D'Ambrosio, this extraordinary novel teaches us that "history has its way, the body has its way, and the rebellions we believe in leave behind a bleak wisdom, if we're lucky -- and defeat, if we're not." The Gin Closet marks the debut of a stunning new talent in fiction.
About the Author
Leslie Jamison was born in Washington, DC, and grew up in Los Angeles. She has worked as a baker, an office temp, an innkeeper, a tutor, and a medical actor. A graduate of Harvard College and the Iowa’s Workshop, she is currently finishing a doctoral dissertation at Yale. She is the bestselling author of The Empathy Exams, and her work has appeared in Harper’s, Oxford America, A Public Space, Virginia Quarterly Review, and The Believer. She currently resides in Brooklyn, NY.