Heroine
In a bathtub in a rooming house in Montreal in 1980, a woman tries to imagine a new life for herself: a life after a passionate affair with a man while falling for a woman, a life that makes sense after her deep involvement in far left politics during the turbulent seventies of Quebec, a life whose form she knows can only be grasped as she speaks it. A new, revised edition of a seminal work of edgy, experimental feminism. With a foreword by Eileen Myles.
Reviews
"Heroine is more a work of reading than of writing, it is all studio, by which I mean it's something fabulously risky and alive. It's literature and the possibility of it." – Eileen Myles, The Paris Review (2020)
"The prose is photographically precise and masterfully cadenced, but its construction is so light and fluid that it almost resembles free association." – Lettres Québécoises
"(In Heroine) Scott’s suggestion …that women 'have another place to speak from' reminds me of Kraus’s observation, in her 2017 biography of (Kathy) Acker, that the experimental writer had to create a position from which to write. For Acker, in novels such as The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula and Blood and Guts in High School, and Kraus, in her novels Aliens and Anorexia and I Love Dick, the formation of the self is a literary project." – Nicole Martin, LARB
"As Ezra Pound once said, literature is news that stays news. There is probably no better example of this notion than Gail Scott’s novel Heroine…First published in 1987, Heroine is a bold, transfixing work, earthy and raw, dreamlike and strangely elegant, threaded through with winding sentences, peppered with lines and conversations in French (a vivid rendering of the life of an Anglophone in a Francophone culture). It retains all of its original, revolutionary force not just because of that stylistic daring, however, but because many of its concerns remain, in suitably shifting forms, to be key concerns today." – Robert Wiersema, Toronto Star
"When I finally read …Heroine, a young lesbian’s feverish account of living in a Montreal boarding house in the early eighties, ….[i]t was easy to see how you might want to live in Scott’s sentences forever, or, as [Renee] Gladman did, transcribe them from memory onto your living room wall. I read them again and again for the pleasure of pure description…" – Oriana Ullman, The Paris Review recommends (April, 2022)
"Gail Scott implants her heroine in the no-where abysmal dwelling of an abjection which may be torturous, but it is alive, and associated with all that lives in the darkness of desire, the noisy spilling-over city, undomesticated and free." – Rachel Levitsky, Tripwire
"The texture of Heroine - dense with the images, smells, and sounds of the city - is the texture of the world absorbed through all the pores of a woman's body." – The Village Voice
"Heroine sounds like Montreal, mingling French and English, often in the same sentence, the same breath. The city vibrates in these pages, as Gail immerses us in the Plateau of the seventies." – Montreal Review of Books
"Set in the late 1970s but read in 2021, in a time of pandemic and lockdown, this brilliant feminist novel was almost deliriously engrossing." – Camille Roy, Journal of Narrativity
"Heroine made me decide to be a writer." – Zoe Whittall, author of The Spectacular
"…a lost classic." – Jade Colbert, The Globe and Mail