Jessica Woodbury's Reviews > Tipping the Velvet

A book featuring drag, gender fluidity, sex work, dildos, fisting, and socialism set during the 1890s, written in the 1990s, that still feels incredibly relevant in the 2020s. Just goes to show how much stays the same in the queer community.

This was a treating myself reread. I can't remember how I first encountered Sarah Waters (I suspect it was when Fingersmith made the Booker list, such things mattered to me in the early 00's) but it feels like she's been there my entire adult life. Her first three novels were some of the first queer art I encountered period, but definitely the first ones that helped my baby queer self understand our community's history, our context, and that we were much bigger than the white cis gay men that were all I'd seen represented until then.

I have reread other Waters novels but for some reason never this one, I think perhaps my initial thought reading it after Fingersmith was that it was a little disappointing to me because I thought it would be more like Fingersmith. But this time I came in not expecting it to be a twisty complexly plotted thriller but just exactly what it was: a queer coming of age novel. And it truly is stellar at that. I enjoyed myself so much while reading it. It feels so relevant, so relatable despite the vastly different experiences Nan has from someone today. (Rereading Sarah Waters with appropriate expectations also gave me much better experiences with The Little Stranger and The Paying Guests. Interesting.)

I read an interview with Waters where she said she has a hard time going back to this book because to her it feels so obvious that she wrote it in her 20's, and to that I would like to say this is one of the book's biggest strengths! It really gets you in that 20's mindset, and Nan makes very 20's decisions that are often bad. She found Nan so selfish and thought maybe she'd make that different, but again I disagree. Nan's selfishness is part of what makes her feel so real, part of what gave me that time travel back to being 22 feeling of it all. I kept responding to Nan out loud, I said "Oh sweetie" like 50 times. Because oh sweetie we've all been there.

I love the looseness of it, how it rejects the hero's journey and instead has the structure of Nan does this then Nan does that which is how life works. I love a tight plot but I also love a plot that is just Character Figures It Out As They Go. Characters appear and they may randomly show up or disappear never to be seen again except when you're gay all your ex's will show up at the same big party. Again, relatable!

The audio is great, Juanita McMahon gives us all kinds of accents and has a very fun time. You can tell all the characters apart, she's a pro.