Sister Golden Hair: A Novel

by Darcey Steinke

Overview

It's the summer of 1972 and girlhood has never been more fraught, but Darcy Steinke captures all of it with an intimate, startling grace.

When Jesse’s family moves to Roanoke, Virginia, in the summer of 1972, she’s twelve years old and already mindful of the schism between innocence and femininity, the gap between childhood and the world of adults. Her father, a former pastor, cycles through spiritual disciplines as quickly as he cycles through jobs. Her mother is chronically dissatisfied, glumly fetishizing the Kennedys and anyone else who symbolizes status and wealth. The residents of the Bent Tree housing development may not seem like beacons of the secret knowledge that Jesse is looking for, but they’re all she’s got. Her neighbor tans on the front lawn and tells tales of her married lover; her classmate playacts being a Bunny at Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Club; the boy she’s interested in fantasizes about moving to Hollywood and befriending David Soul. In the midst of her half-understanding, Jesse finds space to set up her room with her secret treasures: a Venus Flytrap, her Cher 45s, and The Big Book of Burial Rites. But outside await new sexual mores, muddled social customs, and confused spirituality. It’s a terrifying time—in the shadow of Manson and the hangover from the idealistic sixties—when alienation overtakes liberation. Girlhood has never been more fraught than in Jesse’s telling, its expectations threatening to turn at any point into delicious risk, or real danger. Darcey Steinke captures all of this with an intimate, startling grace.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781935639947
Publisher:	Tin House Books
Publication date:	10/14/2014
Pages:	336
Sales rank:	875,953
Product dimensions:	4.80(w) x 7.70(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Darcey Steinke is the author of the memoir Easter Everywhere (a New York Times notable book) and the novels Milk, Jesus Saves, Suicide Blonde, and Up Through the Water (also a New York Times notable book). With Rick Moody, she edited Joyful Noise: The New Testament Revisited. Her books have been translated into ten languages, and her nonfiction has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, the Boston Review, Vogue, Spin, The Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, and the Guardian. Her web-story “Blindspot” was a part of the 2000 Whitney Biennial. She has been both a Henry Hoyns and a Stegner Fellow and Writer-in-Residence at the University of Mississippi, and has taught at the Columbia University School of the Arts, Barnard, The American University of Paris, and Princeton. She lives in New York City.

Editorial Reviews

07/07/2014
Steinke’s (Easter Everywhere) latest novel opens as 12-year-old Jesse’s father, an ex-Methodist minister, is settling the family in for a new life in Roanoke, Va. With a perpetually dissatisfied mother, a father tossed in the waves of spiritual uncertainty, and a little brother happily rooted in the childhood that Jessie is quickly leaving behind, she turns to the neighbors in her duplex community at Bent Tree for companionship and guidance. Jesse consults older women wise in the ways of dance and romance, peers well informed on superstitions, and Playboy Bunnies in an attempt to understand the budding sexuality pushing her into the uncharted territories of liberation and loneliness. Her treasures, like her copy of Big Book of Burial Rites and the Cher and David Bowie songs piping from the radio, are the endearing artifacts of a young girl struggling both to stand out and to fit in. Despite its lack of surprises, Jesses’s story is nevertheless convincing, filled with nostalgia for the early 1970s. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

*Sister Golden Hair chosen as an Okra Pick by Southern Independent Booksellers Association
*Flavorwire picks Sister Golden Hair as one of the 50 best independent fiction and poetry books of 2014

“Steinke’s narrator, Jesse, is both unforgettably unique and a quintessential adolescent girl . . . Jesse’s naive admiration . . . and her chameleonlike reaction to whomever she attaches herself to create a painfully true account of a tough phase of life made more so by the disillusions of the time. But as Jesse observes these characters’ hopelessness, she herself becomes more defined—perhaps more the guitarist than the girl in the song.”
—Booklist

"Many authors bounce the sacred and profane against each another; Steinke blasts them together with the intensity of CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC)....Part detective, part medium, part anthropologist, the Steinke heroine is pure bleeding whip-smart heart—voracious for pleasure but too wise to look away from ugliness. In her new novel Sister Golden Hair, the off-kilter quest Steinke has chronicled across her body of work gains a unifying voice..."
—Bookforum

"A novelistic exploration of girlhood and shifting friendships mired in the vastly shifting world of the seventies South."
—Vogue (Vogue's Best Under-the-Radar Books for Fall)

"Sister Golden Hair, with its story of a former minister's daughter finding herself in the suburban South of 40 years ago, feels like an American coming-of-age classic, a '70s period piece that should have already been written but actually hasn't — not with a sensitivity, candor and energy that is all Steinke."
—Los Angeles Times

"Swift, sharply comic and often heartbreaking, Sister Golden Hair is a wonderful novel. . . .Steinke’s edgy characters and their concern with whatever force drives the known world and the unseen world bring power and excitement to this lovely book."
—Miami Herald

"Sister Golden Hair [...] captivates in its strange mixture of the mundane and the fantastical, the pop-cultural and the metaphysical, and it’s very much in the mode of Steinke’s earlier, memorable novel Jesus Saves..."
—Memphis Flyer

"Sister is Steinke’s beautifully written chronicle of girlhood in the ’70s, a time when things were changing, albeit slowly, for women in America. It’s a lush depiction of the decade, complete with fully interwoven details about the music, fashion, and politics of the era, but from the earnest and honest eyes of a curious teenaged girl."
—Bustle

"This book is one of the best of those that bring together several emerging trends: novella-length chapters, autobiographical and autofictional elements, and the maturation of the still-forming mind."
—Flavorwire

"Littered with pop culture, verging on the edge of danger, Jesse’s story in Sister Golden Hair is a mirror not just of a girl growing up in the 1970s, but of what it’s like to grow and change and try to comprehend a whole new world of influences. It’s the story of every daughter born from 1970 on."
—Corduroy Books

"Here's a novel that gathers stunning momentum with every tiny perfect detail, and tracks the feelings of a girl and the mood of a country with the surest touch. With Sister Golden Hair, Darcey Steinke proves yet again that she is one of our most stylish and intense novelists."
—Sam Lipsyte, author of The Fun Parts

“[Sister Golden Hair] absolutely dazzled me . . . a searingly accurate portrait of a time and a way of thinking—a moment in American history when gleeful abandon had decayed into regular old abandon, and when new cultural freedoms suddenly seemed more dangerous than intoxicating.”
—Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love and The Signature of All Things

"Sister Golden Hair is an indelible portrait of a place and time; an argument for adolescent girlhood as a fulcrum for the human predicament; and sentence by sentence, a brilliant piece of writing suffused with all Steinke's characteristic wit, darkness, and profundity. As always, Steinke shifts the terms: it isn't our capacity to be saved or go down in flames that's most at stake, but our willingess to hold the dangerous, bleak, exciting, full mess of life up to the light, to behold and bear its mottled grace. Steinke has become a master at this fearless beholding, and I trust her deeply, will go wherever she wants to take me."
—Maggie Nelson, author of Bluets

"A daring and arrestingly beautiful novel about what it’s like to walk through the world, wide awake, taking in radiant and terrifying messages about everything around you."
—Jenny Offill, author of Dept. of Speculation

Praise for Darcey Steinke

“I became riveted by Steinke's tone, a steady, lovely, hallowed, patient, things-in-themselves hum…[Easter Everywhere is] a delicately wrought little volume…This is a beautiful book.” —New York Times Book Review

“If the novel had an essence (eau de roman), a pithy core, Darcey Steinke would be its genius.” —Los Angeles Times

"Steinke writes some beautifully mystical descriptions of sexual encounters, and the conjunction of sex and the spirit, bodies and souls, is fascinating." —Washington Post

"Steinke's idiosyncratic, unsentimental fourth novel continues her examination of sexual and religious obsession...all the characters struggle to establish a relationship with God through contact with those around them, but Steinke's prose repeatedly hints at the divine in tangible things."—The New Yorker

"Erotic . . . beautifully crafted prose."—Time magazine

"Few authors understand America's darkest fears and obsessions like Darcey Steinke."—Village Voice

Easter Everywhere is an excellent account of a writer going head-to-head with the divine and finding some inner quiet—even in the darkest corners of her imagination.” —Time Out New York

“Darcey Steinke certainly knows her way around characters and plot...it’s a joy to see her inner life finally exposed.” —San Francisco Chronicle

“Steinke unflinchingly recounts years of disillusionment in her stumble back toward faith.” —Entertainment Weekly

“She drew this atheist reader deep into her devotional tale, seducing with prose that is rich and filling, with images that are startling and deep.” —Los Angeles Times Book Review

From the Publisher

★ 07/01/2014
Told from the perspective of a former preacher's daughter who has moved three times in three years, this is Steinke's fourth (after Milk) and most autobiographical novel. It is also possibly the most accurate depiction of tween female experience this reviewer has read, a delight and a rare treat. In 1972, Jesse's parents settle in Roanoke, VA, in a duplex, much to the chagrin of her mother. Jesse is wise beyond her years and narrates the changing philosophical views of her father and the hysteria of her mother in a heartbreakingly grown-up manner. The novel follows her through the obsessive friendships with two girls from the neighborhood and a single mother whose son she babysits. It is also a snapshot of a society in upheaval, and the depiction of changing family values and popular culture through the eyes of a young girl is spot on. VERDICT Steinke writes moving passages on finding the spiritual in the everyday. While the prose is cerebral, the plot will also keep readers immersed. Highly recommended for all readers of literary fiction, even those who don't usually seek out coming-of-age stories.—Kate Gray, Worcester P.L., MA

Library Journal

2014-08-14
Steinke (Milk, 2005, etc.) ponders the nature of religious faith in this coming-of-age story about a defrocked New-Age minister's daughter's adjusting to her family's new life in suburban Virginia in the early 1970s.In 1972, 12-year-old Jesse moves with her parents and 4-year-old brother, Philip, from Philadelphia, where her father has once again been fired for his unconventional methods and beliefs as a Methodist minister, to Roanoke, Virginia, where he has found work as a counselor. While he is an intellectual idealist unable or unwilling to function in the practical world, Jesse's deeply frustrated, emotionally erratic mother craves respectability and material comfort. Their marriage seems unhappy to Jesse, but their basic decency shows in bits and pieces throughout the novel. Having settled into Bent Tree, an apartment complex where the motley mix of residents struggles to pay the rent, innocent yet precocious Jesse begins seventh grade desperate to fit in but also afraid of her body's pubescent changes. After popular Sheila rebuffs her, Jesse becomes soul mates with Jill, who believes her family has been cursed. Unfortunately true to Jill's beliefs, her alcoholic mother disappears, leaving Jill and her younger siblings to fend for themselves until someone (maybe Jesse's mom) calls in social services and Jill exits from Jesse's life. Three years later, Sheila, whose popularity has faded since a scandal surrounding her dad's sexuality, draws Jesse into her fantasy life involving Playboy Bunnies and her own incipient sadomasochism. Jesse also begins a relationship with potentially dangerous but pathetic bad-boy Dwayne. But by 10th grade, Jesse has turned into the accelerated student with smart friends she was always meant to be. Then Jill, now a devout born-again Christian, reappears to confuse and challenge the beliefs (or lack thereof) that Jesse's been struggling with all along. Steinke brings the world of Bent Tree to vivid life with a cast of secondary characters more sharply drawn than Jesse and particularly her parents, who are never quite fully realized on the page.

Kirkus Reviews