Teethmarks on My Tongue

by Eileen Battersby

Overview

The gunning down of her mother in a Richmond street sets young Helen Stockton Defoe on a journey of self-discovery. A physical feature she had first noticed when she was nine years old has made her feel apart and she has quietly capitalized on the privilege, never mind the aura, which surrounds her. She lives in her head and fills her thoughts – and days – with science, horses and art. The more intently she begins to observe her remote, detached father, the more she learns about her place within the rarefied world she inhabits. Just when it appears she is at last becoming closer to him, it all falls apart as he coldly undermines her abiding passions, which causes her to question the identity she has created. Her rebellion leads her to Europe on a disturbing path dominated by chance and an evolving self-realization. As a result of these experiences she gains an ability to feel deeply, something from which she had always felt somehow excluded.

This most unusual coming-of-age novel with its impressive characterization, humor and vivid sense of place takes its clever, if barely street-wise and increasingly obsessive, teenaged narrator on a physical as well as psychological journey towards an astute, hard fought, and deserved, maturity.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781628971477
Publisher:	Deep Vellum Publishing
Publication date:	11/09/2016
Series:	American Literature Series
Pages:	420
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.40(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Born in California, Eileen Battersby is a graduate of UniversityCollege Dublin. An Irish Times staff arts journalist and literary reviewer, she has won the National Arts Journalist of the Year award four times and was National Critic of the Year in 2012. Second Readings: From Beckett to Black Beauty was published in 2009. Ordinary Dogs – A Story of Two Lives was published by Faber in 2011. Teethmarks on My Tongue is her first novel.

Editorial Reviews

This is the whole world of horses, of Americans in Europe, of love and laughter and tragedy, told with brio and complete mastery. The heroine is compelling, delightful—and unique! The passion of this novel is expressed through its expert construction."

Huffington Post Edmund White

"A remarkably accomplished work."

Irish Times

This is the whole world of horses, of Americans in Europe, of love and laughter and tragedy, told with brio and complete mastery. The heroine is compelling, delightful—and unique! The passion of this novel is expressed through its expert construction."

Edmund White

"A remarkably accomplished work." —Irish Times

"Competitive rider, aspiring physicist, brilliant and pertinacious teenager: Helen Stockton Defoe takes her place among literature's unforgettable deadpan narrators. . . . A perceptive, keenly intelligent bildungsroman, well marbled with dark humor, about inhabiting one's own life, body, and emotions despite upbringing and uncertainty." -Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review

From the Publisher

★ 2016-08-22
Competitive rider, aspiring physicist, brilliant and pertinacious teenager: Helen Stockton Defoe takes her place among literature's unforgettable deadpan narrators like Meursault and Oskar Matzerath.In this first novel by Battersby (Ordinary Dogs: A Story of Two Lives, 2011, etc.), the literary correspondent for the Irish Times, Helen lives a charmed if lonely life of elite Southern privilege on her family's Richmond estate. Living amid her veterinarian father's thoroughbred-filled stables, she is kindly treated by her classmates but mostly friendless, wanting for nothing but emotionally disconnected from her arrogant, brooding father and frivolous, detached mother. When her mother is publicly shot by her crazed lover, Helen joins her father, who, like her, values animal companionship over human, in shrugging with bewilderment—and a touch of indifference—at her mother's violent and ignoble death. Helen is largely content to tend to her passions, science, art, and horses, until her father's beloved racehorse dies, leaving him awash in the bitterness and grief that failed to appear after his wife's murder; he denounces serious and disciplined Helen as a mere dilettante, bound not for a life of invention and discovery as the scientist she has always dreamed of becoming but that of a historian, an eternal observer. In disgust, she flees to Paris but, after a perilous incident with a loathsome stranger, regrets having chosen a city she'd never much cared about over Berlin, a place better suited to her character. Helen is saved from mounting self-loathing, despair, and aimlessness by an elderly lost dog who "wail[s] like a Confederate widow" and gives her a renewed sense of purpose. Her mission, to stay in Europe long enough to find a way to bring Hector back home to Richmond to die, leads her to a training yard in Amboise and to true passion, love, and sorrow. A perceptive, keenly intelligent bildungsroman, well marbled with dark humor, about inhabiting one's own life, body, and emotions despite upbringing and uncertainty.

Kirkus Reviews