‘Sweetener’ overview: Marissa Higgins’ novel is a enjoyable sapphic romp

In 1984, at age 33, I fell in love with a lady for the primary time. Her identify was Cathy. Her earlier girlfriend’s identify was additionally Cathy. “Wasn’t that confusing, sharing a name with your girlfriend?” I requested. She shrugged. “Everything about being a lesbian is confusing at first,” she mentioned. “You get used to it.”

In “Sweetener,” Marissa Higgins’ attractive, poignant second sapphic novel, the reader is served loads of confusion, lesbian-related and in any other case. For starters, two of the guide’s three protagonists, who’re breaking apart as we meet them, are each named Rebecca. With 18,993 women’ names in energetic use in up to date America, why would Higgins construct this disconcerting aspect into “Sweetener’s” construction? It proves to be a call well-made. As the reader turns the pages, studying to individuate the 2 Rebeccas (whose central battle is studying to individuate from one another) provides us bonus details about, and empathy for, each of them.

“My wife and I have the same first name, though our friends never used mine; I’ve always been Rebecca’s wife,” Rebecca No. 1 says of Rebecca No. 2 — No. 2 being the extra highly effective one, since she’s the one initiating the breakup. “Our last names, too, are still the same, as I took hers at our court wedding,” No. 1 tells us. “With the same name, it’s easy to become one person instead of two.”

Applying for a part-time cashier job close to her dismal D.C. condo, Rebecca No. 1 mulls, “Inside the market, I remind myself I am a person. I have an age, a birthday, an address.” When the shop supervisor asks about Rebecca’s hobbies, she thinks, “Making rent? Getting myself off? Finding a woman with more money than either of us to take me to the dentist?”

The partaking, unique plot of “Sweetener” is advanced, too. Unbeknownst to Rebecca No. 1, she and No. 2 (PhD pupil, much less depressed, extra conniving, heavy drinker) are each relationship Charlotte. Obsessed with having a child, Charlotte wears a pretend being pregnant stomach, a truth recognized solely to Rebecca No. 2, as a result of Charlotte retains her shirt on whereas having intercourse with Rebecca No. 1. (Having Charlotte considering, “Please don’t notice please don’t notice please don’t notice” to cowl Rebecca No. 1’s failure to note that her sexual companion is carrying an enormous baby-shaped silicone belt appears a little bit of an, um, stretch.) Both Rebeccas have nice intercourse with Charlotte. Neither Rebecca desires to cease.

Rebecca No. 2 additionally desires a child and doesn’t wish to cease consuming, which suggests not bearing however as a substitute fostering a baby, which suggests enlisting Rebecca No. 1 within the effort, for the reason that two are nonetheless legally married, and fostering as a single divorcee requires a minimal one-year authorized separation. Neither Rebecca is for certain whether or not pretending to be married will consequence of their precise reconciliation. Only Rebecca No. 1 is for certain that she desires that.

“I know it’s not fair of me to ask anything of you,” Rebecca No. 2 admits in a telephone name to her soon-to-be ex-wife, “but I’m serious about wanting to have a family.”

“Sweetener” is the second novel by Marissa Higgins.

(Catapult)

Desperate as she is for a reconciliation, Rebecca No. 1 mulls, “When she says she wants me to think about how important a family is to her, and what this could mean for her, I understand she is not using the word we… I tell her I miss her and she says she misses me, too. Then she says, ‘So you’ll come by when the social worker is here?’”

In 1984, after I dated Cathy No. 2, just like the Rebeccas, many of the lesbians I knew have been younger, poverty-stricken and uncomfortably enmeshed with their lovers, and so they thought-about “lesbian” to be their major identification. Unlike the Rebeccas, we have been additionally terrified by the implications of being out throughout what have been extraordinarily harmful occasions. During the Eighties and Nineteen Nineties, Cathy and I have been chased down metropolis streets by males shouting slurs at us. We have been refused rooms in resorts. Cathy would have been fired from her childcare job if she’d come out at work. My custody of my youngsters was threatened. I used to be banished from my father’s residence.

“My wife and I go to our first class on child development together,” Rebecca No. 1 tells us. “Next to my wife, I feel cool.” Just a few pages later, she observes: “The social worker tells me I’m lucky to have a partner who values non-threatening communication.” During their residence go to with a second D.C. social employee, the Rebeccas lie about a variety of issues — mainly, their marital and monetary instability. But they don’t lie about what Cathy and I might have needed to conceal if we’d tried to undertake a baby within the Eighties. Living in an enormous, liberal metropolis, the Rebeccas don’t really feel the necessity (nonetheless required for security in “red” locales) to name one another roommates or buddies. They name one another wives, as a result of in 2025 same-sex marriage and parenting are givens, not distant fantasies.

Ten years after it grew to become “cool” (and authorized, and publicly acknowledged) for a girl to have a spouse; 40 years after I and lots of, many others paid a horrible value for popping out in our households, workplaces and neighborhoods, lesbians like Marissa Higgins are creating lesbian characters who dwell in a sweeter, changed-for-the-better world. The sugar that made life safer for us is the queer activism that begins with telling true tales of queer lives and persists at this time with renewed want and renewed vigor. “Sweetener,” the novel, is a enjoyable romp via one model of lesbo-land circa 2025. Higgins’ “Sweetener” celebrates and accelerates the lengthy, tough trip to lasting queer equality.

Maran, writer of “The New Old Me” and different books, lives in a Silver Lake bungalow that’s even older than she is.