Not that polyamory is necessarily the better option; I’ve learned the hard way that there’s just as much that can go wrong in an open relationship as in a monogamous one.

Straight people are going to be downright confused by a lot of this book and queer people are probably going to fight about it. The Big Chill goes gay in Davis’s raunch-com about six queer Brooklynites spending the holidays at a Hudson farmhouse. There wasn’t quite the same degree of drama and lies and jealousy, but that was a major turning point in terms of choosing the week upstate as the container for the book. Sasha has the hots for Jules, a tall butch news anchor clearly inspired by Rachel Maddow, and both envies and pities Jules’s longtime partner, Miranda, for being old and boring, for having settled down in comfort and style.This a major factor for Sasha, who is very feminine, versus Jesse who is masc, and other characters in the story who have had top surgery, go by they/them, etc. Even if the trip includes a third couple - Jesse's best friend, Lou, and their cool-girl flame, Darcy - who Sasha ridicules yet desperately wants. This novel is written in one semicolorful declarative sentence after another and there is honestly something appealing about the pah-pah-pah rhythm set up by this kind of prose, like the appeal of reading something written by a teenager who draws little hearts above the i’s instead of a dot, and although I found the story pointless and shallow maybe it’s purposefully pointless and shallow, like those pop art Campbell soup cans that were already passé the first time you saw one, and although this novel is not as interesting as the arrangement of old chewing gums you happen to notice on the sidewalk as you’re walking along, it almost is. I think it’s really interesting to learn how much “femme” means to different people in all sorts of different ways, but I do think that a thread that I’ve found that unifies a lot of femmes is sort of the embrace of joy and humour and coyness. When Jesse and Darcy collaborate an ill-fated livestream performance, a complex web of infatuation and jealousy emerges, sending Sasha down a spiral of destructive rage that threatens each couple's future.

At heart a love story, Dykette seductively examines themes like queer nonconformity and its place in a heteronormative world. There is gender diversity here that feels actually accurate, with a masc nonbinary person and a butch who uses he/him pronouns along with she/her and still identifies as a lesbian. When her face looked hot, her tits came out lumpy, and when her body looked acceptably supple, the filter distorted her facial features into a mess of plush green fur and digitized eyelashes.

She typed the words come back to me in white font, massaged the text down to its tiniest possible size, and implanted it, subliminally, in the gleam of the Grinch’s pupil.