Dykette: A Novel

by Jenny Fran Davis

Overview

Named one of the Best LGBTQ+ Books of 2023 (So Far) by Vogue • Named a Best Book of 2023 (So Far) by Cosmopolitan • Named a Best Book of Spring 2023 by Esquire • Named a Most Anticipated LGBTQ+ Book of 2023 by BuzzFeed, Electric Literature, and Them

An addictive, absurd, and darkly hilarious debut novel about a young woman who embarks on a ten-day getaway with her partner and two other queer couples

Sasha and Jesse are professionally creative, erotically adventurous, and passionately dysfunctional twentysomethings making a life together in Brooklyn. When a pair of older, richer lesbians—prominent news host Jules Todd and her psychotherapist partner, Miranda—invites Sasha and Jesse to their country home for the holidays, they’re quick to accept. Even if the trip includes a third couple—Jesse’s best friend, Lou, and their cool-girl flame, Darcy—whose It-queer clout Sasha ridicules yet desperately wants.

As the late December afternoons blur together in a haze of debaucherous homecooked feasts and sweaty sauna confessions, so too do the guests’ secret and shifting motivations. When Jesse and Darcy collaborate an ill-fated livestream performance, a complex web of infatuation and jealousy emerges, sending Sasha down a spiral of destructive rage that threatens each couple’s future.

Unfolding over ten heady days, Dykette is an unforgettable love story at the crossroads of queer nonconformity and seductive normativity. With propulsive plotting and sexy, wickedly entertaining prose, Jenny Fran Davis captures the vagaries of desire and the many devastating places in which we seek recognition.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781250843135
Publisher:	Holt, Henry & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	05/16/2023
Pages:	320
Sales rank:	999,822
Product dimensions:	8.50(w) x 5.50(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Jenny Fran Davis received her MFA from the University of Iowa, where she was an Iowa Arts Fellow. The author of Everything Must Go, a novel for teenagers, she lives in Brooklyn.

Editorial Reviews

01/02/2023

Three Brooklyn couples descend on a Hudson Valley farmhouse over Christmas in Davis’s waggish send-up of lesbian culture (after Everything Must Go). The reader’s guide through the gay yuletide antics is Sasha, a high-femme graduate student whose relationship with Jesse hits the skids after she overhears Jesse’s virtual therapy appointment: “It feels like I’m starving for love, and she’s feasting on it.” The house is owned by Jules, a primetime newscaster à la Rachel Maddow, and Jules’s partner, Miranda, a therapist with a podcast. They’re soon joined by Darcy and Lou, the former an artsy influencer. The six cook in the house’s commercial-sized kitchen, hike in the Catskills, and sip hot drinks made with oat milk. Together, they revisit the 1990s film Boys Don’t Cry, and Sasha lusts after Miranda while thinking about Chloë Sevigny. Meanwhile, Darcy, whom Sasha dismisses but secretly envies, pronounces the film “dated.” The couples’ extended stay becomes more fraught after Jesse and Darcy take to livestreaming an erotic art performance, and Sasha, who thought she’d incorporate the trip into her graduate research on queer domesticity, reexamines her fantasies and theories. Though there’s a bit too much exposition, Davis delights in upending concepts of gender and sexuality. It’s more digressive than propulsive, but it’s worth adding to the weekend bag. (May)

Publishers Weekly

Named a Most Anticipated Book of Spring & Summer by Bustle • Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2023 by Our Culture, Yahoo!, The Millions, LitHub and Spy • Named a Most Anticipated Debut of 2023 by Debutiful and Goodreads

"[A] biting gay millennial comedy of manners...While depicting rituals both mundane and vaunted...the novel also plumbs its characters’ fears of intimacy, failure, and irrelevance."
—New Yorker

“This is a book full of queer vocabulary and gossip written in a bold, unapologetic way. And why should it be otherwise? With Dykette, Davis has filled what has been mostly an empty shelf in the literary world.”
—The Washington Post

“At heart a love story, Dykette seductively examines themes like queer nonconformity and its place in a heteronormative world.”
—W

“If a beach read is like eating a tasty little snack, reading Dykette was like huffing drugs: noxious and mildly euphoric.”
—Cosmopolitan

“Davis’s new novel reads like a taxonomy of queer theory, references, and history, while offering up wholly new words and takes on contemporary lesbian life.”
—Vanity Fair

“Davis gives us honest…insights into a queer domestic fantasy.”
—The Cut

“A fascinating look at queer couples and how things like gender, sexuality, age, and even horniness can affect everything about a relationship.”
—Cosmopolitan

“[A] biting tale of two young queer couples who go upstate with an older lesbian couple...plenty to cringe and laugh at.”
—Rolling Stone

“If you’re in the mood for a sexy novel that explores the messiness of queer relationships, Dykette should be on your list.”
—The Advocate

“The Big Chill goes gay in Davis’s raunch-com about six queer Brooklynites spending the holidays at a Hudson farmhouse. Come for the sometimes-riotous relationship drama, stay for the myriad cultural in-jokes...”
—Electric Lit

“There’s a whiff of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf in this wry, horny battle-of-the-lovers, and also the sensation of piecing together some gossip on Instagram. Dykette makes a strong case for mixing goofiness with sexiness in contemporary fiction.”
—Bustle

“Dykette takes on desire, debauchery, and destruction through a distinctly queer—and propulsively entertaining—lens.”
—The Millions

“[A] sexy debut novel.”
—Nylon

“Through Sasha, Davis constructs a field guide to queer dynamics, making sharp observations about generational divides, the butch/femme dynamic, and what it means to perform your gender or sexuality (as exemplified by an explosive plot about performance art). You won’t soon forget Sasha, nor any of the other larger-than-life Brooklynites in her cohort.”
—Esquire

“Part romance, part steam, this may be the beach read you want this Pride Month.”
—Eagle Times

“This deeply smart, original, and funny debut novel has permanently shifted my understanding of the relationship between honesty and performance.”
—Marissa Higgins, The Millions

“Dykette is a riveting and often darkly funny novel that accurately examines New York queer culture with an insider's authenticity.”
—Bust

“In her first novel for adults, Davis explores what happens when people are isolated physically while remaining very much online...A view of contemporary queer life presented by a spectacularly unreliable narrator.”
—Kirkus

“Davis delights in upending concepts of gender and sexuality...It's worth adding to the weekend bag.”
—Publishers Weekly

“An engagingly self-aware and entertainingly claustrophobic story of performance and realness.”
—Booklist

“A bold and refreshingly zany novel of gay millennial life in New York, Dykette is sharp and unsparing as a play piercing needle. Bound to set countless group chats afire, this book signals Jenny Fran Davis as a writer to watch.”
—Sarah Thankam Mathews, author of the National Book Award finalist All This Could Be Different

“A hilarious, astute, and captivating tour of a young femme’s interior life over the course of one long weekend upstate. Dykette is a portrait of a certain corner of queer culture that is part satire, part ode, and full of delightful cringe. Davis’s unrelenting scrutiny is a consummate pleasure; I gasped with laughter and delight on nearly every page.”
—Melissa Febos, author of Girlhood

“Dykette stared directly into my soul, pinned me against a wall, and made me look inward, consider the sharp and ugly parts of myself. A novel that can accomplish that complexity while also being wickedly funny, achingly sensitive, readable as hell—simply put, Jenny Fran Davis is a talent.”
—Jean Kyoung Frazier, author of Pizza Girl

“Dykette is hilarious, smart, and has (in my humble opinion) the best opening scene of any novel I've read in ages. I don't think I'll ever look at the Grinch—or bathtubs—in the same way again.”
—Grant Ginder, author of Let's Not Do That Again

“Dykette turned me on and freaked me out in the best possible way! Imagine if Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? were recast with two generations of very-online queer folks. Tense, smart, and thrilling . . . with a charismatic pug named Vivienne to boot.”
—CJ Hauser, author of The Crane Wife

“Jenny Fran Davis is a real troublemaker, and Dykette is my favorite kind of trouble—sexy, messy, full of gossip and glitter, and cunning, and thus of course profoundly revealing about our strange times. Text me when you finish!”
—Andrea Lawlor, author of Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl

“A blast of defiant frivolity, Dykette is so perceptive it hurts and as fun and decadent as wearing Gaultier in a bubble bath.”
—Beth Morgan, author of A Touch of Jen

“Like a tightly rolled spliff passed around the room, you will inhale Dykette. This sexy, at times silly, and wonderfully searing romp through our masquerades of identity, love, art, entertaining, and social maneuvering is a deeply observed novel of manners for today. Davis’s characters slink off the page, bewitching, seducing, snuggling up in your lap to whisper stories of our tender, bungled humanity.”
—Samantha Hunt, author of The Unwritten Book

“Dykette is an invigorating and hilarious examination of queer identity and intimacy. It’s a novel about being trapped—trapped inside your own head, trapped inside relationships, and trapped inside a chilly upstate New York vacation home. The only thing more horrifying than perceiving one’s self is being perceived by others, and Jenny Fran Davis explores both actions with an audacious and tender wit.”
—Bobby Finger, author of The Old Place

From the Publisher

04/13/2023

Author of the YA title Everything Must Go, Davis makes her adult debut with a darkly humorous exploration of gender, lesbianism, and the struggle to be known. The story centers around Sasha and her butch partner, Jesse, who are spending the winter holidays with their acquaintances, liberal news anchor Jules and her therapist wife, Miranda, at their home in Hudson, NY. Joining them is Jesse's best friend, Lou, and Lou's influencer girlfriend, Darcy. Since Jesse has made friends with Darcy, Sasha sees Darcy as a rival and harbors a furious jealousy as Jesse helps Darcy prepare for a live performance planned during the trip. Davis's prose is simple and rhythmic, making it easy to get absorbed in the story. The middle of the novel drags a bit, but tensions run high near the end before crescendoing to a dramatic finale. The narrative is deeply entrenched in queer culture, and many readers will find the portrayal genuine and have plenty to discuss. VERDICT A niche read that will really stick the landing when it finds its audience; recommend to readers of messy, queer dramedies who enjoyed Jen Beagin's Big Swiss.—Jennifer Renken

Library Journal

2023-03-11
In her first novel for adults, Davis explores what happens when people are isolated physically while remaining very much online.

Over the course of 10 days—as 2019 turns into 2020—three New York couples convene for an ostensibly bucolic holiday getaway. Cable-news host Jules Todd and her partner, therapist/podcaster Miranda Saraf, are the “queer elders” with enough money and enough of a sense of domesticity to own a second home in the Hudson Valley. Lou runs a home-goods shop in Bushwick that has been featured in Vogue. Their new girlfriend, Darcy, retails coveted fashions on the Lower East Side. Perhaps more importantly, she’s leggy and gorgeous and has a blue checkmark next to her name on Insta. Jesse is a set decorator by trade and a “Renaissance butch” by inclination. He’s there with Sasha, a graduate student working on a cultural history of femininity as defined by small spaces and miniaturized objects. Most of the story is narrated from Sasha’s point of view, and if the descriptions of the main characters seem hyperspecific, it’s because Sasha is acutely aware of both status and LGBTQ+ typology. How readers react to this novel will largely depend on how they react to Sasha. Both she and her creator clearly understand that she’s a whole situation—radically insecure and spectacularly self-involved, emotionally demanding but never not playing a role, impulsive while never losing sight of her immediate goal. During the time covered by this narrative, her immediate goal is to not let Darcy replace her as the adorable bimbo in this particular ménage. The battle for high-femme dominance comes to a head when Jesse and Darcy collaborate on a piece of livestreamed performance art that Sasha perceives not just as infidelity, but also as a parody of her sweetly pink aesthetic.

A view of contemporary queer life presented by a spectacularly unreliable narrator.

Kirkus Reviews