Product Description

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.

Ella Bloom, an adult student in Rachel's poetry class, has aspirations beyond 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. She is also preoccupied with one of her repeat patients, Georgia, a teenager whose frequent clinic visits speak volumes. 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 eyes the yardsticks by which we constantly measure our world and ourselves -- devotion, lust, forgiveness, and courage.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #374072 in Books
• Published on: 2005-05-31
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 304 pages

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.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Review
"An appealingly dark first novel...authentic, substantial and engaging."

-- The New York Times Book Review

"Glatt's brave and vulnerable observations channel the provocative writer Anne Sexton....She dares to infuse dark humor where tear-jerking sentimentality would be easier....A powerful debut."

-- The San Diego Union-Tribune

"A Girl Becomes a Comma Like That adds an emphatic exclamation point to the start of a promising career."

-- Vanity Fair

"Razor sharp and exceedingly funny. A heartfelt and troubling book about how things go wrong, time after time, and how we manage in spite of it."

-- Frederick Barthelme

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter One: Dirk or Derrick or Dick

My mother is sick at home, and I am downtown, full of beer, kissing a long-haired man in the pizza place next door to Ruby's Room.

His name is Dirk or Derrick or Dick. I make a mental note to find out which one before I let his hand into my skirt.

I met him at the bar next door less than an hour ago.

His hands are huge, one of them making its way to my blouse's top button.

It's early May, and even at this late hour the Southern California heat is something to talk about.

"It's hot," he'd said at the bar, fanning himself with one of those hands.

I watched the long fingers flip back and forth in front of his face. "You'd never even know it was night," I said.

"Too many people in here breathing all at once," he said. "Want to go next door?"

I shook my head no, but smiled at him.

"You're ambivalent," he said.

"I'm not," I said, turning away from him and looking out the front door. A girl with pink hair held a cigarette, leaned against a streetlight, and a skinny boy stood next to her, pulling on her sleeve. She brushed his hand off and shook her head. I turned back to Dirk or Derrick or Dick, who now spoke with a rubber band between his lips and was using both hands to gather his hair behind his head. "You know them?" he mumbled.

"No," I said.

He pulled the band from his mouth and put his hair back in a ponytail. Several dark strands fell into his face and he pushed them away. "Come on, let's go," he said.

"Bacco's?" I wavered.

He nodded.

"Isn't it closed at this hour?"

"I work there." He picked up a set of keys that had been sharing a napkin with his beer.

"No, really, I can't," I said.

It is my mother's second recurrence of breast cancer, a pesky piece of disease showing up in her hip, appearing two Sundays ago as an annoying limp, nothing more -- no pain, just a slight shift to the left, an inability to find balance in her body, which has become increasingly unruly.

My mother, on her way to the high school where she's been teaching twelfth-grade English for the past twenty years, wobbled out the front door on Monday with her book bag over her shoulder, wondering out loud, What is this limping about?

When she returned home, we sat together on the couch -- my mother full of optimism, me full of denial -- and discussed the possibilities: arthritis, muscle strain, perhaps even osteoporosis. Maybe she'd broken her hip and didn't even know it. "It happens," I said. Wasn't there some distant cousin who'd done just that? We pitched diseases against each other, feeble bones and constant joint pain -- nothing, when compared to what was actually happening.

Exactly how I changed my mind and ended up in the pizza place with Dirk or Derrick or Dick, I'm not exactly sure. I know my best friend, Angela, had run into an old boyfriend on her way to the bathroom and never returned to her stool. I know there were several tall glasses of cold beer involved, and I know that my new pal was talking about breast cancer, his mother sick too, good God, dying on some farm in the middle of Maine, and then an impassioned speech -- by me, of course -- about living in the moment, carpe diem, and all of that hooey.

Now, we're in the back of the restaurant, in the kitchen, my ass exactly where the pies had been earlier, where this man, all perfect torso and bad teeth, had stood in his white shirt and funny square hat, pounding the dough and spreading tomato sauce and sprinkling cheese and proudly scattering little rounds of pepperoni on five pies at once. The two of us are as ferocious and unconcerned about public safety as cancer itself, holding on and moving and panting and kissing and sucking as if we are each other's much-needed medicine, like we are the experimental treatment that might finally work.

Bare-chested in his boxers, he slips his hands inside my blouse, holds my breasts like they are the first and last breasts in the world, and all I keep thinking about is how breasts are the enemy, armed, dangerous, two ticking bombs, how my mother's are killing her right this moment, and he of all people should be afraid of them, should refuse them, slip them back inside the black bra from whence they came, but oh, oh, maybe Dirk's or Derrick's or Dick's thoughts are better, more accurate and optimistic than mine -- his lips and tongue and heat, they certainly feel better.

His fingers are making their way into my tights when I say, "Spell your name."

"Huh?"

"Please," I say.

"You don't know my name?"

"Just spell it."

His name is Dirk. He spells it for me. "D-I-R-K," he says, rolling his pretty brown eyes.

"Dirk," I say.

"Your name is Rachel Spark."

"First and last. Impressive."

"You teach, right? Your eyes are green and you've got one dimple, on the left side of your face."

"Now you're just showing off."

Dirk reaches behind him and lets his ponytail free in one swift pull.

"What about you?" I ask.

"Story's messy," he says.

"And sad?"

He nods and his hair falls to his bare shoulders. He looks at me and leans in. "Your mother is sick," he says quietly.

I reach for his chest. "D-I-R-K," I say. "Dirk," I whisper into his neck.

He collects old cars and toasters. He owns two Studebakers, a Nash, and a Sunbeam. He's thinking about buying a Triumph; there's one for sale on Fourth and Cherry. He owns more than one toaster that's older than his great-grandfather. "I've got a Triple Banger worth over five grand," he says, beaming.

A lot of vehicles, plenty of places to stick his sliced bread, but no home; Dirk lives in a shack behind the restaurant and bar. He uses the bathroom and sink in the restaurant when he wants to wash up. It's been this way for months, and he doesn't remember the last time he paid rent.

"I couldn't live like that," I say.

"It's fine," he says. "It's convenient. I practically live at my work. Who wouldn't like to do that?"

I picture myself living in a tent on campus. "Me," I say.

Earlier tonight I sat with my mother on her bed, sharing one phone. Our skulls knocked, our ears touched, and neither of us would let go of the receiver. "I'll hold it," I said. "I've got it," I whispered. "So do I," she whispered back. Reluctantly, we decided to share.

The doctor's voice was upbeat and straining to remain so, even when the words came: metastasis, diameter, radiation, and maybe some more chemo.

"Oh, well," my mother said when we'd hung up. She was smiling. "We know now what we're up against."

"Yeah," I said.

"I feel better," she continued, standing up. "It's good to know what we're dealing with." She paused. "And I didn't want osteoporosis anyway."

I shook my head.

"He said that there's a chance..."

"What now?" I said.

"A few zaps of radiation and I'll be fine, Rachel. Don't get all dramatic on me. Don't look at me like that."

"Like what?"

"Like I'm disappearing," she said. "I'm still here."

"I know," I said.

"It's just my hip," she continued. "No one ever died from a sore hip. Do you know anyone who ever died because of such a thing?" She picked up a blouse from her dresser and held it in front of her face, checking for wrinkles. "Do you think I can wear this one more time?" she asked me.

"Probably," I said.

"Worry if it goes to my liver. They say that's when you're supposed to worry." My mother opened her closet and took out some hangers. She set the hangers on the bed next to me, holding on to one of them.

"That would be worrisome, yes," I said.

"They say you've got to fight. You've got to be strong."

"Okay, okay," I said, annoyed.

"They say a good attitude makes a big difference." She had the blouse on the hanger now and was putting it in the closet. Her back was to me.

"You have a good attitude," I said, "and it's recurred. What's your good attitude done for you?"

"Well, they say -- "

"Who are they?" I said.

"You know, them," she said.

"Oh, them," I said angrily. "Let's certainly listen to them. The invisible them."

Dirk's shack has a metal roof and a little metal door that he holds open for me. I stand leaning, torso forward, with my boots half in and half out, peering in, until Dirk insists with a gentle nudge of his hip that I move inside. He uses a flashlight to show me around. I get most of the tour standing in one spot. He has cats, three of them. Two look out at me from under a table, four glowing eyes, and one circles Dirk's pant leg. He's got an old mattress on the floor he calls a bed. There are toasters lined up on shelves like fat silver books. "Check them out," he says.

I step past Dirk and the cat. I bend down and feign interest. "Wow," I say. "Nice," I tell him.

Yes, he is thirty-six, but he's been grieving -- for nearly ten years. It's pathetic, sure, but behavior that I recognize and can empathize with -- the inability to move on, get on with things, foreseeable in my own future. In addition to the dying mother, Dirk had two sisters who'd come to visit him in California eight years ago and were killed in a car accident. It was Thanksgiving, and the three of them were on their way to Palm Springs to visit an uncle. Somewhere near that ridiculous dinosaur on Route 5 a woman swerved into their lane and killed the girls instantly. Dirk survived with a scratch on his forehead, a bruised hip, and a twisted toe. So, because of this, I'm guessing, he didn't finish college and he's never held a decent job, and once, he wants me to know, he lived for three months without a working toilet. This is all wonderful news and if, in my drunk and needy state, I'd had any intention of seeing Dirk again, the confessions are dimming the possibility, especially the bit about living without a toilet.

"I need to get going," I say, stepping outside.

"Now?" he says.

I look at my watch. "It's after three."

He shrugs.

"I've got a class tomorrow."

"Let's sit on the curb and look at the moon -- it's full," he says.

"No, I -- "

"What time's your class?" he interrupts.

"One-thirty, but I've got to prepare," I say.

"Sure," he says, doubtful.

"I told you that earlier, remember?"

"But the moon's full," he says.

Customer Reviews

very nearly perfect
I am so in love with this book, even though it's a little weak in a few spots. It's like the author was trying a little too hard to make a group of unrelated short stories hang together. However, this shouldn't stop you from reading this book. It's phenomenal and the strengths more than make up for the weaknesses.

This is one of the books that once you read, you'll want everyone you know to read so you can have someone to talk about it with.

observations of the relationship between sex, death & love
A mother dying of breast cancer who wants to love, a daughter with a revolving door into her bedroom but a Beware sign on her heart, a desperate, acerbic friend whose lips puff like down pillows and beds a man because she likes that he likes her, a woman who obsesses over her husband's infidelity, and a teenage girl with moxie who lends out her body like a library book while her father pines over the mother that left them behind: Elizabeth, Rachel, Angela, Emma, and Georgia are the central figures in Lisa Glatt's auspicious novel-in-stories, A Girl Becomes a Comma Like That.

The novel shifts between the women's points of view from 1997-2000, all bearing the weight of someone leaving. At the center is poetry teacher, Rachel Spark, who has been coping with her chipper mother, Elizabeth's bought with terminal breast cancer. For over six years, Rachel has remained in her mother's home, ferreting Elizabeth to chemo sessions, cosmetic surgery and leech therapy all amidst Rachel's own unraveling. A bevy of men haunt her bedrooms with their accents, their stories and finally, after an unprotected one-night stand with a Brit and a mother who creeps quickly towards death, Rachel finally confronts loss and the possibility of life after her mother.

During the day, Emma Bloom lectures girls about safer sex, sees girls with round bellies, STD cancers that fester and spread, infecting a girl's body and stands side-by-side with the woman she found kissing her husband (a man who studies bats) and wonders about love, what does it imply, who does it implicate and how it is possible that one can love and be comforted too soon. Most compelling is Georgia. A teenager alone with a brother who longs for escape from their cold home, a despondent father, and a mother who has taken up house with another - Georgia's body is this thing - this empty thing that gives her power.

Bodies are merely an assortment of parts that can be manipulated and molded to get one through one's day. A breast implant provides posture, balance - a mouth is an oracle to quiet with cruel words or silence through oral sex, - Lisa Glatt's debut is all at once an uncomfortable and unflinching look about women's complicated relationship with their bodies. Many of the characters bear the weight of abandonment by their loved ones and often are left to raise themselves. Disease with respect to relationships and the body is so intricately linked which raises an eye to the close relationship between sex, death and love.

Glatt's dialogue is authentic, prose sparkles and many of the passages are absolutely heartbreaking. The structure is a bit rough at times with the reader having to flip back and forth to locate oneself in time (same with long passages that switch between present/past tense), however, that aside, A Girl Becomes a Comma Like That is honest, pensive and uncompromising.

Raw and Real
Glatt will keep you enthralled as you follow the lives of several complex and multifaceted women dealing with issues small(sexual preferences) and large(death and infidelity). Has a Sex in the City feel, but much grittier and raw. Don't look for a cookie cutter ending to this novel. Rachel and the other characters in this book are far too real for a Disney ending.