Cory's Reviews > Juliet Takes a Breath

Yesterday my girlfriend and I finally decided to get library cards. With little to no impulse control, I excitedly grabbed about ten books and had to be dragged away when told that I could actually check out fifty.

Juliet Takes a Breath was the first book I decided to read out of that stack. Usually when it takes me one day to read a book it means it was so all encompassing and interesting that I could not pull my eyes away from the page. In this respect, it's somewhat true that JTaB was interesting—only in that I could not understand that I was reading a book written by an adult and not the first writing project of a teen who just discovered queer theory on tumblr.

As I read the book, I occasionally would throw out quotes to my girlfriend as I literally could not believe I was reading a published book. I've read lesbian fan fiction better than this book—no joke, before you waste your time on this book read this
Santana/Quinn fan fiction that actually makes you feel genuine emotion. It's also set in New York City (aren't all Glee fan fictions?) and it explores the complexity of emotion associated with being lost and gay without attempting to soapbox at you for 260 pages. Granted the last chapter is a bit heavy on the drama, but its a Glee fan fiction. If you're into Hispanic culture and don't mind reading about gay boys, you could give Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe a spin. It's got body.

Or you could read
The Mis-Education of Cameron Post which to this day remains hands down the best written book about a lesbian of all time. A book so great that Gabby Rivera's own employer, Autostraddle, gushed about it ad-infinitum to the point where I thought Emily Danforth had written a sequel. Not that Autostraddle has actually produced content that appeals to non-kinky 20 something gays like myself who just want to feel like we aren't lost in a sea of ddlg BDSM sex kinks that include straight poly people as queer and force us so-called "assimilationist" gays to the side. Basically those of us who don't have full ride scholarships, or parents with money, or who just aren't willing to shave our heads and dye them with the trans flag. Don't get me wrong, I appreciate those things but sometimes it feels like the aesthetic includes more straight people who think they're queer than actual gays who have to fit in to survive. Being black and gay is hard enough in this world. Some of us can't afford to throw Socialist Queer Rallies and work in coffee shops while we progress our writing careers. Quite frankly, being poor kinda sucks.

Anyway. Let me back up a little. I didn't know Gabby Rivera wrote for Autostraddle when I started reading this book. In fact, I mixed this book up with Girl Mans Up which is about a Canadian lesbian and looks like it could be awesome or awful depending on whether the author was writing a "how to be gay" manual or an actual fucking story.

So, Juliet Takes A Breath is about Juliet, a 19-year old Puerto-Rican gay from the Bronx in 2003 who lives on a block with crackheads, 17-year old prostitutes, and assholes who grab up their dicks in the grocery store in an attempt to impress (?) assault (?) our main character. Juliet goes to college in Maryland, has a girlfriend, isn't out to her parents, and is way way into this book called Raging Flower: Empowering Your Pussy By Empowering Your Mind. The book sounds straight out of the second wave feminist movement (ie, incredibly dated) as some chapters open with a quote from said fictitious book about pulling blood clots out of your vulva to observe in the act of being a ferocious cunt. I can not make this shit up.

Juliet is enamored with this book and the author, Harlowe Brisbane. So much so that she writes to Harlowe to ask if she can intern for her for the summer for college credit. Harlowe says yes and invites Juliet to spend the summer with her in Portland, Oregon—a place so magical to naive Juliet that she imagines it to be flush with naked lesbians frolicking in the forest. Which, to be honest, is kind of what the book thinks Portland is. Now, I was born in 1994 which means I was nine in 2003 but according to this book Portland was a hotbed of multi-cultural lesbians popping out and trying to consensually and awkwardly get your number and fuck you in the shower at every turn.

Before she leaves for Portland, Juliet comes out to her family. All of them, with the exception of her mother take it well and while one would think this is a contentious corner stone for the book—considering how much emphasis is placed on family and Puerto Rico—we barely get any conversations of merit between Juliet and her mother at all.

I am not Hispanic. Yet, if I were, I'd feel so cheated by the lack of genuine cultural connection to anything at all in this book. For a book that talks so much about PoC and intersectionality this felt milquetoast at best. I grew up in a Puerto Rican neighborhood and I used to live in a Dominican neighborhood earlier this year. In New York City. The very place this narrator is supposed to come from. And it didn't feel genuine. She gets super excited about Lolita Lebrón for five seconds and that's it. For fucks sake, this girl did not know what a Banana Republic was until she researched Lolita Lebrón and concluded that colonization was bad and we never hear anything about her connection to her culture again.

This entire book could be summarized, culturally, by the fact that a woman named Lupe does acupuncture on her once (which is traditional Chinese medicine if I'm not mistaken?) and she sees her cousin wearing a shirt that says "Bruja" so in the appendix she, too, concludes that she is a Bruja despite the fact that we have no understanding of what this means to her, if she even practices magic, and sigh—it feels like white girls who call themselves wiccan and wear pentagrams despite never reading a book about wicca or pagans or even the damn bible. It makes me wonder if its even possible to appropriate your own culture because this girl calling herself a Bruja reminds me of black dudes calling themselves Pharaohs and Nubian kings even though we all know that most of us are from Cameroon and Angola and they've not bothered to even learn about the native cultures there.

I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter and Gabi, a Girl in Pieces put this mess to shame in terms of allowing me, a cultural outsider, a peak into it feels like to be a strong willed, intelligent Mexican-American woman. Juliet Takes A Breath feels like a white woman writing about what it feels like to be Puerto Rican, which is a shame because Gabby Rivera is actually Puerto Rican.

This leads me to my main problem with the novel. Instead of reading like a novel, it reads like most gay books of the early 2000's: a sounding board for the author's thesis on being queer.

So, because this book is for you, the reader, to absorb everything Gabby Rivera has ever learned about being queer (because an artificial hierarchy is drawn between queers and gays to equate the latter with white sellouts), Juliet can't actually know anything. So, despite having actually stepped foot in Stonewall, she doesn't know what Stonewall was about. Everyone is so condescending to this poor, ignorant girl I couldn't decide if she was dumb or if the author didn't actually know what living in 2003 was like. Not that I do, but I know how ignorant we teens were in 2011.

The terminology used is very tumblr circa 2013-14. Which doesn't make sense. Juliet doesn't know what micro-aggressions are, what preferred pronouns are, what polyamory is, what gender identity is, what gender essentialism is, what radical politics are, etc.. etc... But she knows who Alan Ginsberg is and she's really into second wave feminism. In 2003. Yet everyone treats her like an idiot because she doesn't know what the aforementioned buzzwords mean when they weren't really a hit with the teens until tumblr discourse came into play.

Essentially, this novel could take place at any point in time except for the fact Juliet sends her girlfriend mixtapes. A girl actually sent me a mixtape a few years back, but it was through 8tracks so the gays are still into that, I suppose. Thank god there was no Ani DiFranco on it.

Gayness, as presented in this book, is something powerful and radical. Quite like the state of being a woman in the 80's if you were into more radical feminism. Smash the patriarchy, smash heteronormativity, smash monogamy, smash clothing, smash gender (except, respect gender too), smash capitalism, etc, etc..... These are all things I can accept for individuals except they are displayed as the One True way to be gay. Trans Anarcho-Socialists exist, yes. I used to be friends with some. But they are not the majority of gays and they do not hold the keys to the kingdom. If I'd read this book when I was 16 and was also as naive as Juliet I'd have come away thinking something was entirely wrong with me for not wanting to having 3 girlfriends, live on a communist farm (I think the writer meant a commune but fuck if I know), and write about the dignity of my feminist vagina power except also to be inclusive I should include girl!dick as well. Which, nothing wrong with girl!dick, but it leads me to my final point about this novel.

This book, as a whole, and probably why it feels so disjointed and awkward, is basically a treatise against white privilege and white feminism with a nod towards trans inclusion and the banishment of vagina-centric feminism. Which is great. If it weren't attacking an idea that was popularized in the 1980's and has mostly taken a fall since then as we've moved more towards criticizing the other blend of second wave "I can fuck 30 men and and still be an empowered cool girl" commercial feminism that rose in response to the vagina-centric, transphobic, all sex is rape Andrea Dworkin feminism.

The book feels both late and early. Third-Wave feminism came about in 1993, about ten years before this book takes place. We had already moved beyond hippy dippy white woman vagina flower bullshit. I have no idea why Raging Flower would've suddenly become popular when in 1993 Rebecca Walker wrote this: "So I write this as a plea to all women, especially the women of my generation: Let Thomas’ confirmation serve to re-mind you, as it did me, that the fight is far from over. Let this dismissal of a woman’s experience move you to anger. Turn that outrage into political power. Do not vote for them unless they work for us. Do not have sex with them, do not break bread with them, do not nurture them if they don’t prioritize our freedom to control our bodies and our lives."

Two years later, in 2005, Ariel Levy wrote Female Chauvinist Pigs, a takedown of the culture that Gillian Flynn described in Gone Girl: "Men always say that as the defining compliment, don’t they? She’s a cool girl. Being the Cool Girl means I am a hot, brilliant, funny woman who adores football, poker, dirty jokes, and burping, who plays video games, drinks cheap beer, loves threesomes and anal sex, and jams hot dogs and hamburgers into her mouth like she’s hosting the world’s biggest culinary gang bang while somehow maintaining a size 2, because Cool Girls are above all hot. Hot and understanding. Cool Girls never get angry; they only smile in a chagrined, loving manner and let their men do whatever they want. Go ahead, shit on me, I don’t mind, I’m the Cool Girl."

I don't disagree with taking down white feminism but the argument against it is so misplaced and disjointed for the time that it feels like a strawman. Were white lesbian feminists talking about pulling blood clots out of their vaginas, saying pussy, and getting mass acclaim for it back then? I don't know, but it just feels off.

The books is clearly anti-TERF (trans-exclusionary feminism) yet it fails to mention them by name. I'm not trans so I'm not going to speak for trans people (go to Contrapoints instead, she's great, though she also insists that she doesn't speak for all trans people), but the book makes some large claims regarding the strawman it created in Raging Flower. Yes, vagina feminism can be problematic. But, quite frankly, the majority of women have vaginas. Legislation is drafted to tell us what we can and can't do with them. We are shamed for having them, shamed for being interested in knowing how they function, and shamed for even referring to them with the correct words (Vagina, Vulva, etc) on the senate floor. Yes, feminism should be inclusive of all women, which includes trans women as they are women, no debate on that point. BUT this novel never elaborated on why vagina feminism is actually harmful to trans women in terms of battling TERFs. It simply stated that Raging Flower didn't mention trans people enough. Despite the fact that book is literally for women who have vaginas. Empowering Your Pussy is in the subtitle of this fake book.

I just... don't understand...

And then the book tries to roll back on that by having Juliet question if white people should write for everyone or write to their own experience and it starts feeling like Gabby Rivera got lost in her own theory and decided to stop thinking critically about the subject for fear of offending someone.

We also get a few random moments of Juliet freaking out because she thinks Harlowe is racist to state that she lives in a ghetto. She literally leaves the bookstore, runs away, has sex, and flies to Miami. She has an entire shit fit because someone "judged her" and was supposedly racist in assuming that she lived in a ghetto. I had to double check the first chapter of this book to make sure that she actually grew up in the shit part of the Bronx and not like... Astoria.

I repeat: Juliet lives on a block with crackheads, 17-year old prostitutes, and assholes who grab up their dicks in the grocery store in an attempt to impress (?) assault (?) her.

I don't know about you, but I've lived in a ghetto and while my dad got his windows shot out regularly we didn't have crackheads prowling the streets with 17-year-old prostitutes. I saw a crackhead on the train a few weeks ago. She just sat down right next to me and whipped out her crackpipe and started puffing away. That was surprising and certainly not normal for Harlem which leads me to believe that Juliet a) lives in a shit neighborhood, and b) is in deep denial. Like, yes I get it—white people are clueless and think they're so great and awesome for saving poor underprivileged kids and whatever. I would feel absolutely offended if some white woman said she saved me from the ghetto because for the great majority of my life I've lived in white neighborhoods. But Juliet—you live in a literal ghetto with crack heads and child prostitutes. You have a full ride scholarship to a fancy liberal arts school because you are poor. Sanctimonious much?

It's like Gabby Rivera had so many ideas but could not express a single one of them with clarity or wit. She spends a few pages talking about blackness and how white people assume that because you're black you must always want to be into black things. Which is valid, except the character in question is actually running the black event that the white character suggests she go to which we find out a few chapters after she takes such a huge offense to the pamphlet she was given about said event!

At a certain point I spent a few paragraphs just reading the shitty parts out loud to my girlfriend in an effort to prevent myself from slamming the book against my forehead. Apparently your hips can wrap around your partners waist when you're getting fingered. I tried that after I read the passage aloud with my girlfriend and it was awkward AF. Don't recommend. The sex scenes weren't entirely laughable but they certainly weren't titillating either. Which is sad, because I thought Gabby Rivera was a lesbian. Straight women have written better sex scenes between men.

Anyway, the only positive thing I can find myself saying about this book is that Lil' Melvin was a good character. I liked him and his twix bars and the fact that he was totally into Animorphs. Lil' Melvin is my dude and I could totally read an entire book about him... except not written by Gabby Rivera because I think she'd fuck it up and make it about counter culture leather tankie enby daddies or some shit like that.

tl;dr: This book is like tumblr. But the references are all over the place. And Juliet is less a character and more a sounding board for all the Queer Theory this author has ever learned about.