a favorite book, positively surging with red flags
Laurie Weeks' Zippermouth is 6.97 x 8.23 x 0.49 inches & 166 pages.
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Laurie Weeks’ 2011 novel Zippermouth is A Perfect Purse Book. It’s both discreetly proportioned and dense with dry humor. It struts around with the hardest of hard femme covers. I could spend time with it endlessly, wherever I am. However distracting the surroundings, Zippermouth is more distracting. I’ve read it maybe four times and could go for four more.
Zippermouth is intense and about intensity. In the novel, an unnamed twenty-something New York lesbian has a dope habit and a crush on her best friend. She spends her days trying and failing to kick both. Like a perilously stupid crush, Zippermouth charmed me despite being primarily composed of red flags. The protagonist brags about personality features that I’ve never had a moment of patience or sympathy for: gay crushes on straight girls, over-attachment to The Bell Jar, being “constitutionally incapable of dealing with the laundry.” I thrill to make exceptions for Zippermouth. Making exceptions is so affectionate.
Zippermouth book spills wildly. It’s very messy. And at the same it’s splashing all over the street, it flows from a completely singular, intimate point of view. I feel like the title Zippermouth might have prompted this association, but I kept thinking of these Ann Hamilton photographs, that she took from the inside of her mouth using a pinhole camera. In an interview with Art21, Hamilton calls the mouth a room, which isn’t the part I’m quoting from, I just am in love with that. Anyway, Hamilton describes her work—a photo of the outside world from inside body—as showing “the skin of the architecture, or the material is always seeking the border, remarking upon the border.” Her photos don’t just demonstrate the edge or the in-between, they completely occupy it.
Like you’re a pinhole camera clenched behind teeth, Zippermouth just surrounds you with sticky intimacy, snapping open and showing you its particular view of the world. The voice of this book is loud. It’s the loudest thing. It’s loud in a way that reminds me of this thing I read that our own voices in our heads would be the loudest sound, if it weren’t for a complicated protection to our ears. Reading Zippermouth, you feel like you’re inside the narrator’s mind and body and speaking mouth. It’s kind of too intense! It’s kind of terrifying to be inside someone’s mouth! It’s kind of scary to be so close to a person, scary the exact way a deep crush is scary. And thrilling! As it should be!
