Genevieve Sly Crane is a graduate of the University of Massachusetts and Stony Brook Southampton, where she received her MFA. She teaches in the Creative Writing and Literature BFA program at Stony Brook. Sorority (Scout Press, 2018) is her first publication.
-
SororityA Novel
What is the difference between beautiful girls and ordinary ones? My face was symmetrical. I’d taken Accutane. I wore the right things. None of it made a difference next to Tarryn. She had a shimmer about her, a light that I could never fully understand. I couldn’t even make eye contact with her. It was like staring at the headlights of a car on a dark road. Later, in my sorority, and even later at my job, I’d meet other women like her and wonder how they were made.
Sorority:A Novel -
SororityA Novel
Mothers are strange women, with their round faces always turned down to their children à la sunflowers too fat with the weight of their own heads. Pre-me, my mother was an interesting person. She wore a bikini and drove a boxy green Barbie-ish convertible. Now she’s my mother and she says standard-issue banalities about any event (grocery store shopping, nephew’s baptism, lunch at Rita’s), such as, Oh, what a riot! and We had a lot of laughs! In a dark moment in high school I asked her why we were all alive. What was the point, etc. She said, Oh, Margot, if you think about it too much it loses all the shine. Then she laughed like she was at a banquet and I’d just told her a joke about a priest in a bar.
Sorority:A Novel -
SororityA Novel
I never dreamed that I’d suddenly be adrift in the world as a civilian and not a sister. All of those long hours of carefully curated approval, the insane litany of songs during rush, the perfection of the head tilted just so at cameras, the sluggish dinner talks about what was on TV then and what would be on TV later and who had notes to Intro to Linguistics, all of that fraudulent cultivation of superficial friendship, gone. There had been so much potential to have people to love.
Sorority:A Novel
"One of the most gripping and beautiful works of the year . . . Crane captures the tinge of desperation, that hint of the unbearable, that comes with being a college-aged woman." —Jenny Hollander, MarieClaire.com [on Sorority]
"This book will eat you alive. It's messy, nasty, merciless, hilarious, and razor sharp, just like the young women it's about. It made me wince and squirm and flinch and I loved every single minute of it." —Kristen Roupenian, author of You Know You Want This [on Sorority]
"Crane, once a sorority sister herself, skillfully reproduces sorority life: the particular cruel caring of these friendships, the intensity of this way station before the adult world, the way the decisions made during that time can stay with a young woman . . . [an] unflinching depiction of hardhearted girls growing up." —Kirkus Reviews [on Sorority]
In clear-eyed, razor-sharp sentences, the novelist Genevieve Sly Crane masterfully assembles a chorus of intimate voices whose slippery descent into emotional violence is as harrowing as it is moving to watch. Crane's scenes are taut, sliced through with dark humor and dialogue that crackles with electricity, illuminated by bursts of insight that flare suddenly into view. Her book is an unflinching examination of the kinds of cruelty women perpetrate against one another and against themselves, as well as a measure of how capacious their selves can be, no matter how small the world wants to make them. She finds literary power in places where no one else is looking for it.