A Girl Becomes a Comma Like That: A Novel [Hardcover]

Lisa Glatt (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 1, 2004

Hauntingly observant and insightful, this poignant debut novel delves into the intricate bonds between mothers and daughters and offers an unflinching, darkly funny look at the relationships between love, sex, and death.

Rachel Spark is an irreverent, sexually eager, financially unstable thirty-year-old college instructor who moves back home when her mother is diagnosed with terminal breast cancer. As she tries to ease her mother, a perpetually cheerful woman, toward the inevitable, Rachel turns from one man to the next -- sometimes comically, sometimes catastrophically -- as if her own survival depended upon it.

"If I slept only with men who knew my full name, if I signed up for dance classes, if I ate more fruit -- even then there was no guarantee I'd get what I wanted," she thinks. And so she goes off with Johnny, who wears "all silk: black silk pants, a red silk shirt, even a silk band holding his hair in a ponytail." Or with Adam, an old boyfriend who remembers her with a bob she never had and tries to seduce her in his car with dark-tinted windows. Regardless of her unsuitable and unlikely bedmates, Rachel can't distract herself from what she knows about cancer -- that it disappears or returns, seemingly with a will of its own. But Rachel's not the only one struggling with the uncertain turns life takes...

Ella Bloom, an adult student in Rachel's poetry class, aspires to more than her work at a local family planning clinic. But she spends her nights wondering why her husband kissed one of her colleagues and whether it will lead to a full-fledged affair, and she is also preoccupied with one of her repeat patients, Georgia, a teenager who frequents the clinic and hasa story of her own. What they all have in common is their desire for love, despite its many obstacles.

"A Girl Becomes a Comma Like That" is a novel rife with wit and compassion. A provocative, assured new voice in literary fiction, Lisa Glatt knows the yardsticks by which we constantly measure our world and ourselves -- devotion, lust, forgiveness, and courage.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

At the center of A Girl Becomes a Comma Like That, Lisa Glatt's heroic, hauntingly honest debut, is Rachel Sparks, a thirtysomething college professor who moves back home to sit with her mother while the older woman succumbs to terminal cancer. Glatt frames Rachel's story against a backdrop of women who range in age from 16 to 60, all of whom struggle with the conflicting sense of power versus the chilling vulnerability that seems so essential to their roles as women.

Although Rachel's mother's fate is apparent from the first chapter, Glatt does a commendable job of keeping the reader interested in her characters throughout the entire novel. We follow Rachel as she jumps from man to man, focusing on minute details while ignoring the basic flaws that make these men so fundamentally wrong for her. Along the way we get to know Rachel's student Ella Bloom, who must confront her cheating husband after less than a year of marriage. Ella's days are spent at a women's health clinic treating patients like 16-year-old Georgia Carter, who repeatedly exposes herself to sexually transmitted diseases in the hopes that one of these boys will show her the real affection that she can't get at home. ("Other men and boys noticed Georgia. It was as if they saw straight up inside her, all that she had done ... She understood that her body belonged to the whole damn street.")

While Glatt does an admirable job of showing women's weaknesses--and strengths--when dealing with men, it is her remarkable understanding of the tumultuous relationship that women have with their own bodies that makes this novel unique. From mastectomies to reconstructive surgeries to abortions to virtually anonymous sex, Glatt skillfully demonstrates how complex a woman's relationship with both her body and mind can be, and the tremendous power one often has over another. --Gisele Toueg

From Publishers Weekly

"A girl becomes a comma like that, with wrong boy after wrong boy," muses the narrator of Glatt's keenly observed debut. "She becomes a pause, something quick before the real thing." Rachel Spark, a 30-ish university poetry teacher, is looking for the real thing-but she's also living in L.A with her mother, "because she was sick and because I was poor.... It was love, yes, but need was part of it too." As her mother slowly succumbs to breast cancer, Rachel seeks solace-and escape-in the arms of various unsuitable men. Glatt's tone shifts through comic, pensive and mournful as she also explores the lives of Rachel's newlywed student, Ella Bloom; her lovelorn, allergy-challenged best friend, Angela Burrows; and Georgia Carter, a promiscuous 16-year-old patient at the health clinic where Ella works and where Rachel later seeks an abortion. Repeated references to breasts, limbs and organs in discomfort and disease foreground these women's uneasy relationships with their bodies and their lives; drunken and sorrowful sex abounds; connections with men are made and then broken. Rachel loves her mother, but disapproves of her shedding her wig, ordering a vibrator and falling in love in the face of death. As the dying woman-Glatt's liveliest character-evicts Rachel from her hospital room, readers may sympathize: much earlier, mother has diagnosed daughter, "You're thirty. Of course you need connection." Glatt's clear-eyed rendering of the complexities of relationships between friends and family enriches a story in which the steps toward healing are small and tentative, but moving nevertheless.
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Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster (June 1, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0743257758
• ISBN-13: 978-0743257756
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.7 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (40 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,838,744 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

26 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars tragic beauty, October 1, 2004

By 

JK - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Girl Becomes a Comma Like That: A Novel (Hardcover)

Lisa Glatt's book is not chick lit or anything close to it. If you want to read about shopping and fashion and silly girl crushes, go elsewhere. This is serious literature, about cancer and looming death and unavoidable loneliness, and the dark, sad, sometimes sleezy, places depressed women go to hide as a result. Glatt is an honest writer. Beautifully honest. In fact, she makes tragedy almost appealing.

20 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Absurdly, amazingly great., July 29, 2004

By 

reader - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Girl Becomes a Comma Like That: A Novel (Hardcover)

The following is an excerpt from my column, a monthly review of first novels published in the New York Journal News. I'm posting it here because Glatt's novel is among the best debuts I've ever read - it deserves all the accolades and praise it has received, and then some - and I think everyone should know about it.


Lisa Glatt's first novel (she previously published two collections of poetry), entitled A Girl Becomes A Comma Like That, is an accomplished, elegant, inky-black tragicomedy that raises gallows humor to a heartrending art form. Its heroine, Rachel Spark, moves home to care for her terminally ill mother, a dynamic, ruthlessly optimistic woman who seems to be coping with the situation far better than her daughter; Rachel, a thirtyish creative writing teacher adrift professionally and personally, is absolutely devastated at the prospect of her mother's death, and attempts to circumnavigate her grief by sleeping with one inappropriate man after another.

Into this central narrative, by turns poignant and uproarious, Glatt intersperses the stories of three other young women: Rachel's friend Angela, a hapless, socially inept young woman, simultaneously tough and clinging, whose allergies occasionally cause her lips to swell to epic proportions, making it difficult for her to breathe or speak; Ella, a sensitive college undergrad and student of Rachel's, who discovers her new husband is having an affair; and Georgia, a sexually and intellectually precocious teenage girl-and an inauspiciously regular client of the Planned Parenthood clinic where Ella works, and which Rachel visits to have an abortion.

All of the characters, whether treated briefly or at greater length, are distinct, dimensional, and eminently believable. Glatt extracts a sweet pathos from the almost arbitrary, near-miss quality of their uneasy friendships, but what connects these women one to another is less important, and of less interest to Glatt, that what keeps them apart from each other and from anyone else: the loneliness that they have in common, a profound, ineffable lack that each tries and fails to fill with sex. As Rachel muses in the line from which the title is taken, "A girl becomes a comma like that, with wrong boy after wrong boy; she becomes a pause, something quick before the real thing." Love is what each of these women craves-authentic, abiding love, the real thing-but cannot or will not permit herself to have. Each endures the effects of ordinary damage that has been magnified and warped by sorrow and happenstance; each is, in her own way, spun out and dizzied by the centripetal forces of self-destructive compulsions.

These portraits are, deft, wise, beautifully complex, and drawn with a light, even playful touch; the novel is bracingly unsentimental. Glatt does not stoop to easy cleverness or coy ironies, and she offers her characters neither pity nor condemnation (for example, she takes care to juxtapose the main characters' emotional pathologies with victims of cancer, degenerative brain disease, and other physical maladies, casting a cold light on the young women's complicity in their own suffering). Instead, Girl is shot through with ferocious insight, stern compassion, and a mordant humor that provides ballast without mercy; this is a rare, bright, glass-cuttingly sharp little jewel of a book.

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars HONEST and WISE and OH SO GOOD..., September 6, 2004

By 

latchkeykid "latchkeykid" (Los Angeles, CA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Girl Becomes a Comma Like That: A Novel (Hardcover)

We all want our lives to work out a certain way. To be a certain way. But life is messy. And how we handle things often shows we have no idea what we're doing or how to make things better. The women in "A Girl Becomes A Comma Like That" are no exception. And that's what makes them so incredibly relateable. So incredibly real. They make mistakes. They reach out looking for answers in places they may never get them. They act inappropriately like we all do at times. Because insecurity plagues us all in times of crisis--- If only we had someone like Glatt writing our lines for us in such an evocative way, we may get through those times a little better. And feel alot better about ourselves. What Glatt understands and shows us so compellingly is that even smart women do things that don't seem to make sense. And end up in places that don't seem to make sense. These women-- Rachel, Ella, Elizabeth and Georgia don't have the luxury to define themselves with designer outfits and how rich of a husband they can land. They're too real and like most of us, too complex. The journey we go on with them is to places most writers shy away from. But Glatt takes us there in such a full, rich and powerful way that by the time we're done we see just how substantial that can be.