The Girl with the Black Lipstick

Mary Biddinger’s The Girl with the Black Lipstick isn’t simply a blast from the past—it is the past—the year 1999 brought back to life in all its Twitter-less, text-less glory… As in much of Biddinger’s work, the narrative is never linear, a straight-line journey from A to B along bland interstates, but feels instead like an excursion along the backroads of life where all the good scenery is, served up throughout this book in stunningly original images and observations.

This is a story that feels perfectly suited to the novella-in-flash, a reach back to grab the fragments of who we were in the final year of the twentieth century, to hold them to the light in an attempt to understand what peculiar threads connected us.

–Sarah Freligh, author of Hereafter and Sad Math