Banshee

by Rachel DeWoskin

Overview

Samantha Baxter has a full, sane life—creative job, lovely family, and all the trappings of middle-age happiness. But when she gets a diagnosis that terrifies her, a lifetime of polite pleasing and putting others first ignites in her a surprising, pure rage. Maybe Sam will survive the surgery, and maybe not, but either way, she’ll spend the next three weeks burning her life down: sleeping with a student her daughter’s age, speaking every truth she’s ever swallowed, and refusing to apologize for her wildest, most essential self.

“Sexy and sad, dark and funny, ruthless and kind, this is Rachel DeWoskin’s ferociously feminist masterpiece. Every page of it glitters with rage and with love...It radiates with truth.” —CHERYL STRAYED, NYT-bestselling author of Wild, Tiny Beautiful Things, Brave Enough, and Torch

“A wicked, delicious ride towards an ambivalent redemption—angry, hilarious, all too true.” —ALLY SHEEDY, actress and author

“Banshee is the kind of book every woman I know wishes she'd written. Fierce, necessary, honest, a burn-it-all-down scorched earth policy to the toxic masculinity of this Age of Terror.” —Emily Rapp-Black, author of Poster Child and The Still Point of the Turning World

“Raucous, white-hot, and page-turning brilliance...A singular and vital reading experience.” —Gina Frangello, author of A Life in Men

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781948340106
Publisher:	Dottir Press
Publication date:	06/04/2019
Pages:	296
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 7.00(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

RACHEL DEWOSKIN is the author of six books: Blind, Big Girl Small, Foreign Babes in Beijing, Repeat After Me, Someday We Will Fly, and Banshee. Her essays and articles have appeared in The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, The Sunday Times Magazine of London, Teachers and Writers, and numerous anthologies. She spent her twenties in China as the unlikely star of a nighttime soap opera, which became the basis for her memoir. DeWoskin is on the core fiction faculty at the Universityof Chicago, and is an affiliated faculty member of the Centers for East Asian Studies and Jewish Studies.

Hometown:

New York, New York

Date of Birth:

December 1, 1972

Place of Birth:

Kyoto, Japan

Education:

A.B., Columbia College, Columbia University, 1994; M.A., Boston University, 2000

Read an Excerpt

It was just two days later—yesterday, November 3rd—that I found myself in a bathtub five floors above UniversityStreet, soaping up one of my graduate students.

I don’t mean this as an excuse, since bathing my student was a low I never thought I’d sink to, but I’m certain that I wouldn’t have been there if I hadn’t just discovered that I was literally coming apart. I don’t mean “found myself” in a spiritual sense or to suggest it wasn’t by my own agency that I took—or, well, Leah took—my clothes off. Or that I didn’t leap into the tub voluntarily, basically singing my consent. I just mean the situation itself gave me a new perspective from which to view my body, which was about to be transformed forever. Demoted, I thought, although I also tried to convince myself I’d be bionic, perky, invincible. They’d clean the terrors out of me, and in my improved body, I would also find myself somebody new.

But fuck the cheerful, hypothetical version of the facts. Suddenly, for the first time in my nicety life, I’d prefer to fillet my own heart than sit through another brunch with Charles’s or my colleagues—than ask or be asked, “What are you working on?”—than cook, write, sleep, teach, think, do what was right, or remain me. In fact, I wanted to crack open my own cage of bones and run straight out of myself. Or, failing that, could I just sleep with my student Leah every second until the doctors knocked me out?

This turn was only surprising because I’d been such a polite pleaser and goody-two-shoes until now. But maybe that life was a dishonest dress rehearsal for this, my actual final performance. Or maybe it was simpler than that—this impulse toward recklessness predated my “condition,” and I just wanted the wreckage of sex with Leah in the way that drinking too much at a party made you want something you already wanted, and if you drank enough, let you do it. Cancer was letting me do this! Thank you, cancer!

Or maybe my case was, in fact, dire, and therefore forgivable? What if I had very little time left to do anything that took place naked? Or, what if the numbers were off, or I was in that small percent of the bad side of the numbers, the two percent of people who didn’t wake up? (I mean, once it happened to you, then the chances were 100 percent, right?) What if I was one of the ones who was going to die on the table, or just after? Then I would have no time to do anything at all, so that was why I had to risk my entire life. Just to identify what that life was.

Or—let’s say I do survive this. I might still no longer be myself once I’m housed in an altered body. So how can I count on that later self to do anything that might benefit the me I am right now? In fact, what holds a person together at all?

Editorial Reviews

★ 2019-07-01
A breast cancer diagnosis kicks off a feral midlife crisis for a mild-mannered poetry professor.

Samantha Baxter, 42, has a great husband and daughter in college, a successfully published volume of poetry, a good job teaching in a college town. She also has breast cancer and is scheduled for a double mastectomy in three weeks. Almost immediately, she finds herself in a bathtub caressing the soapy hip of one of her students, a redhead named Leah, a girl about her daughter's age. "My life dissolved like an old-fashioned slide show catching fire," she explains. "I just got sick and wanted to burn the world down." For the nearly 300 pages of DeWoskin's (Someday We Will Fly, 2019, etc.) impassioned rant of a novel, the inside of Samantha's head rages like an inferno. After the stress of conducting the poetry workshop in which her new lover is a student, she wants "to hide inside Elizabeth Bishop's letters, to stop my mind from thinking its own language and instead live in hers," but instead she pitches herself into the affair with willfully self-destructive and self-indulgent intensity. Her kind husband, her beloved daughter, and her mother, a breast cancer survivor, watch helplessly from the sidelines. "If anyone thinks her tenancy in the land of the sane and healthy was reliable, she should probably think again, because our bodies and minds have a million shards and parts, so many in contradiction with each other that we cannot count on ourselves not to revolt against ourselves." The narration of this book is so engaging and powerful and the confusion and despair Samantha experiences so visceral and terrifying, reading it feels like being dragged along by the hand by one's braver best friend through a scary fun house. Surely she can get us out of here, you think, but you can't be sure.

With X-ray-vision, empathy, and vivacity under fire, DeWoskin once again finds literary gold in painful circumstances.

Kirkus Reviews

07/22/2019

DeWoskin (Blind) tackles the psychological effects of a life-changing diagnosis in her slow-burning, satisfying fifth novel. Samantha Baxter is a graduate professor of poetry who finds out she has breast cancer that requires immediate operation. Deeply affected by the news, Sam spends the time leading up to her surgery in a fit of existential self-doubt and rebellion, causing her husband, coworkers, and 19-year-old daughter to question her sanity. Almost immediately following the news, Sam begins to sleep with one of her students, a sprightly 24-year-old named Leah who makes her feel exhilarated. Though the affair creates a deep rift between Sam and her husband, Sam pursues it hungrily, leaning into the relationship as a means to distract herself from her mounting panic. Quickly, however, Sam unravels and becomes prone to outbursts during work and other self-destructive behavior. Her fear surrounding her cancer takes a life of its own, leaving the reader to wonder whether things will ever be the same after the operation. Intensely introspective and poetic, DeWoskin’s work traps readers inside the claustrophobic mind of her protagonist and turns up the heat. (June)

Publishers Weekly

Sexy and sad, dark and funny, ruthless and kind, this is Rachel DeWoskin’s ferociously feminist masterpiece. Every page of it glitters with rage and with love...It radiates with truth. —CHERYL STRAYED, NYT-bestselling author of Wild, Tiny Beautiful Things, Brave Enough, and Torch

A feminist call-to-arms, Banshee burns toxic masculinity to the ground with humor and truth. —MS. MAGAZINE

With X-ray-vision, empathy, and vivacity under fire, DeWoskin once again finds literary gold in painful circumstances. —KIRKUS REVIEWS (*Starred Review)

Intensely introspective and poetic, DeWoskin’s work traps readers inside the claustrophobic mind of her protagonist and turns up the heat. —PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

The novel is fast, furious, and extremely funny. —LIT HUB

One of those reads that you can dash through quickly — only to be left mulling it over for months. —NBC NEWS - BETTER

Ferocious, lyrical...one of the most complex, morally ambiguous and intimate stories of body and women’s (still) societally sanctioned roles. —THE COACHELLA REVIEW

A wicked, delicious ride towards an ambivalent redemption—angry, hilarious, all too true. —ALLY SHEEDY, actress and author

Banshee is the kind of book every woman I know wishes she'd written. Fierce, necessary, honest, a burn-it-all-down scorched earth policy to the toxic masculinity of this Age of Terror. —EMILY RAPP-BLACK, author of Poster Child and The Still Point of the Turning World

Raucous, white-hot, and page-turning brilliance...A singular and vital reading experience. —GINA FRANGELLO, author of A Life in Men

A book about a self-destructive poet with breast cancer might not seem like light fare, but Banshee is funny. —NEWCITY LIT

From the Publisher