Book review: Kathleen Bryson’s ‘Girl on a Stick’

Kathleen Bryson

The newest release from queer/bisexual Portland author Kathleen Bryson, Girl on a Stick, reads like a cross between Tom Robbins and Francesca Lia Block. Illogical but viscerally resonating sentences intertwine with distinct attachments to adjective-laden description of place (although Bryson brings a more irreverent portrayal of London than Block does of Los Angeles).

At times dark and brooding, Girl on a Stick is an unnerving anti-love love story.

The plot follows Clementine, an American graduate student in London, who falls in love with a beautiful Norwegian, Per, and then begins to experience — in several odd locations — hallucinations of the Virgin Mary. Intercut with traumatic childhood memories of the Catholic church in her small Washington hometown, Clementine throws herself fully onto the altar of passion, driving herself crazy with questions of fidelity, obsession and self-actualization.

While religious hallucination may not be a universal experience, the problem of love is quite a familiar story. This familiarity brings Bryson’s writing at times to teeter on the edge of a grown-up and alterna-queer version of Are You There God? It’s Me Margaret. Then again, that becomes part of the point as our heroine realizes her self-subsuming actions in light of a great but frightening love. Nevertheless, over the course of 256 pages, the constant lovelorn wallowing can feel just a bit cloying.

Luckily, the style and the characters are unique and fleshed-out enough to make the book as a whole feel both uniquely interesting and easy to relate to. The roughly linear (excluding the childhood flashbacks) timeline and inclusion of world events and newspaper clippings give a solid grounding to Bryson’s beautifully meandering prose. Clementine is so normal in her strangeness that I was drawn into her madness and felt intimately connected to her fate.

Bryson’s world of seemingly incongruous juxtapositions do somehow exist in a very real way either in our heads, our hearts or the tangible world. This story reminds us that both questioning and craziness are part of being human — and the intertwining of sorrow, joy and confusion is precisely what makes love worth pursuing… or abandoning.

You can catch Kathleen Bryson reading “Girl on a Stick” this Thursday Oct. 16th at the Waypost CoffeeHouse (3120 N. Williams Ave) at 8 p.m.