Tess, the protagonist/narrator of Surviving Mae West , is a young West Virginia woman haunted by the trauma of a brutal rape. The novel opens on the day that Tess begins working as a prostitute in a New York City brothel, although her family believes she's an ordinary waitress in a Mexican restaurant.
Surviving Mae West is constructed in a journal format, which allows Tess to emerge with utter candor and realism as readers become privy to her secrets and sink into her complex inner world where intimacy is both dreaded and desired.
Rodd shatters gender stereotypes with her complex everyday-life portrait of a woman employed in the oldest profession. Surviving Mae West is an uncensored story of survival and renewal, told by a narrator as unabashed as John Cleland's Fanny Hill, as flawed and plucky as Wally Lamb's Dolores Price, and as resilient as Dorothy Allison's Bone.
"Rodd's apare but vivid prose echoes the beauty of the landscapes she writes about. She is a complex new voice rising out of Appalachia." -Annie Dillard
Surviving Mae West is constructed in a journal format, which allows Tess to emerge with utter candor and realism as readers become privy to her secrets and sink into her complex inner world where intimacy is both dreaded and desired.
Rodd shatters gender stereotypes with her complex everyday-life portrait of a woman employed in the oldest profession. Surviving Mae West is an uncensored story of survival and renewal, told by a narrator as unabashed as John Cleland's Fanny Hill, as flawed and plucky as Wally Lamb's Dolores Price, and as resilient as Dorothy Allison's Bone.
"Rodd's apare but vivid prose echoes the beauty of the landscapes she writes about. She is a complex new voice rising out of Appalachia." -Annie Dillard
