I Am A Woman

Latest version

Older version, longer title

This is a 1950's lesbian pulp fiction work from Ann Bannon, and includes an introduction, written in 2001.

It's a marvelous book about love. Laura is twenty, and has fled from life with her father to move to New York. Her father was abusive, both physically and verbally to her. She had also had a love affair with a girl, Beth, but the girl ended up getting married to a man.

In New York, Laura moves into a place and becomes the roommate of a woman named Marcie who has an ex-husband that she still argues with and has sex with. Laura gets a secretarial job at a doctor's office, and later befriends a gay man named Jack.

Burr is the typical macho male in his attitudes. When referring to women who like women, he says that “All those gals need is a real man. That'd put them on the right track in a hurry.” An attitude still prevalent in today's world, almost fifty years later.

A lot of the story is along the lines of Laura coming to realize that she really is a lesbian. Her gay friend, Jack, tells her she's gay, but it's quite a while before she really understands and believes that.

So Laura really loves Marcie, but Marcie's straight. Another lesbian woman, Beebo, ends up in love with Laura but Laura's not in love with her. Laura finally confronts her father, who happens to be in New York for a convention, but things go very, very badly, and soon Jack and Beebo are searching for a disappeared Laura, worried that she might have killed herself.

The book works well in various ways. It's a really neat love story. it's a really neat story about how people can understand and help other people. There are some very erotic passages that do not depend on the use of genital-specific terminology that seem to dominate current-day erotic stories.

It's a very gentle book in that way.

This is really a good book (unless you're a person who hates gays and lesbians, of course), and I intend to get other of Ann Bannon's books and review them, also.

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