Prozac Highway [Paperback]

Persimmon Blackbridge (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 1, 2000

Finalist for the Lambda Literary Award

"When your car is spinning out of control heading for the guard rail, you have all the time in the world."

Losing her nerve and burning out fast, hardcore lesbian performance artist Jam has trouble coping with the outside world. Her best friend and former lover, Roz thinks Jam's losing it, big time. Her doctor thinks Prozac is the answer.

Meanwhile, Jam finds love, comfort and support from ThisIsCrazy, a talk room on the internet, where she trades messages and shards of hard-bitten wisdom about treatment and withdrawal with the likes of Fruitbat, Junior and D'isMay. Tough, funny and sexy, Prozac Highway packs a sweet punch. Think Tales of the City in cyberspace and click onto this dazzling literary breakthrough.

Persimmon Blackbridge, is a writer, performer, sculptor, cleaning lady and member of the notorious lesbian art collective, Kiss & Tell. She is the winner of the VIVA award for visual art (1991) and a Lambda literary award (with Kiss & Tell, 1995). Her previous books include an illustrated novel, Sunnybrook: A True Story with Lies (1996), and the controversial Her Tongue On My Theory (with Kiss & Tell, 1994), a collection of erotic images and analysis of lesbianism.

"A beautiful portrait ... Blackbridge writes humorous, intimate, wonderfully restrained prose perfectly attuned to her narrator's vivid inner life ... a tour be force."?Publishers Weekly

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Prozac Highway is the story of Jam, a fortysomething Canadian performance artist who makes her living as a cleaning lady, makes her love over the Internet, and makes up her own definitions of sanity. By using an engaging first-person narrative voice and excerpts from e-mail love letters, Persimmon Blackbridge tells a sad, funny story and in the process questions the definition of self in today's cyberworld. Is the true Jam a harried cleaning lady, a sexy, witty Internet paramour, or a lesbian Everywoman who is burnt out on love, work, and romance? Blackbridge's gift, as demonstrated both in Prozac Highway and in her previous book, Sunnybrook: A True Tale with Lies, is to turn our murkiest, most serious concerns into engaging, intelligent fiction. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

From Library Journal

Blackbridge (Sunnybrook: A Story with Lies; Kiss & Tell) has much in common with her creation, Jam, a middle-aged lesbian performance artist/cleaning lady/psychiatric survivor stuck in a rut in Vancouver's trendy East End. When she is not bickering with her ex-lover over their next collaborative sex piece, Jam is playing computer games or corresponding with kindred spirits on ThisIsCrazy, a listserv for mental-health outpatients. Blackbridge, who like Jam is on the fringe of any community she's a part of, describes the strange kind of fame that comes from being well-known in a subculture, bringing to life the colliding--and frequently overlapping--worlds of lesbians, artists, net communities, and self-proclaimed "crazies" with acerbic wit. Jam and her fellow survivors are smart, funny, and excruciatingly self-aware. Highly recommended for all collections.
-Ina Rimpau, Newark P.L., NJ
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Product Details

• Paperback: 272 pages
• Publisher: Marion Boyars Publishers Ltd (March 1, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 071453059X
• ISBN-13: 978-0714530598
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.4 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,572,352 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars If you want to know what it's like, read this book., January 27, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Prozac Highway: A Novel (Paperback)

I devoured it in an evening, and it has stayed with me for months. It survived a re-read admirably.

The story transports the reader into the chaos that really is madness. A soft and encroaching madness that consumes the reader as it devours Jam, the main character.

Oh yeah, Jam has an "edge"... an edge that cuts through the haze of internal disequilibrium and external expectations. She's complex, she's interesting, and she's accessible.

The mingling of the "real world" and Internet paths are brilliant. Any member of an Internet forum has been there, and it's nice to see it translated so adeptly into one of those paper thingees -- oh yeah, a book.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Book That Captures The Reality of Mental Illness, May 24, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Prozac Highway: A Novel (Paperback)

This book captures what it is to be mentally ill. It is told from the first person viewpoint of a woman who is descending into irrationality. It is painfully accurate in the subtle ways that the irrationality of a mental illness can take over the psyche of an individual. It is more than a self-help or a true experience book though. It is true work of art that captures the reality of the sufferer of mental illness. I have seen it written that the sufferes of mental illness have just a differenr way of looking at reality and that this way may be in its own way more accurate than the normal population. This book to its merit shows the falsity of this idea.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Great book, so why can't she end it?, March 11, 2002

By 

Sarah Lloyd (Seattle, Washington United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Prozac Highway (Paperback)

I loved this book. It wasn't too light or too dark - didn't exaggerate anything. Everything was completely told how it is as far as mental illness goes... and medication as well.
I also loved Jam's character... a fortysomething "hardcore lesbian performance artist" who spends all her free time online, except for when her friend Roz forces her to go to the doctor. She makes up dialogue and relationships for characters in the RPG games she downloads and plays and talks to the ashes... that she cleans for's lover (and they talk back).
I laughed and I cried and read it fairly quickly, just because I couldn't put it down.
However, when it ended, I had no closure. There are some books that are succesful in leaving the endings open, and this is not one of them. There were too many loose ends that hadn't even started tying themselves up.
I'm gonna look for more books by this author though. She has amazing talent and maybe something else she wrote has an ending :)