Nancy Never Married

About the Book

Lee Ann Leonard is a Registered Nurse caught up in the AIDS epidemic of the early 1990s. She is also a poet, trying to break away from medicine and develop her talents elsewhere. The book follows her escape route, which includes passionate relationships with several women. Lee’s attempts to shake off bad memories of abuse she suffered in childhood are counterbalanced by the hilarity of her unsupervised childhood escapades. This is a story of how the past informs and transforms the present, when someone strives to fully integrate her personality into a unified theory of adulthood. *****Review of Nancy Never Married appearing in June, 2003 issue of Out In The Mountains***** Reviewed by Euan Bear Nancy Never Married by Mary Randall. X-Libris Press, 2003. I admit it: I’m a publishing snob. “Self-published” equals “vanity press” to me – where instead of the publisher paying the author, the author pays the publisher. If a work isn’t good enough to get published by a real publishing house, straight, lesbian/gay, or otherwise alternative, then it’s probably junk. Or so I thought until one of Mary Randall’s seven sisters (the one who lives in Vermont) handed me a copy of Mary’s book Nancy Never Married (published by X-Libris, a “print-on-demand” – aka self-publishing – outfit) and asked me to read and review it. I gave her no guarantees and worked hard to deflate any expectations. I shouldn’t have bothered – with the deflating, I mean. Nancy Never Married is as good as any lesbian lit I’ve read in the last five years. I can’t imagine why it wasn’t picked up by Spinsters Ink or New Victoria, unless the agent who shopped it around ten years ago spurned the women’s presses in favor of the big mainstream houses, who couldn’t figure out how to market it. The story opens with the nurse-turned-poet first-person narrator, Lee Ann Leonard, driving to Long Island from upstate New York to give a poetry reading, after which she is offered hospitality, then seduced by Maeve, a local free spirit. But the real plot is in the growth of the narrator, her abusive and non-monogamous ex-lover, and the lesbian – and straight – community they live in. Randall weaves in past and present almost seamlessly, delving into the constant stream of associations any given object or event can evoke: Maeve’s reaching for a bottle of ginko biloba capsules calls up the moment when Lee’s ex-lover Liz shouted “Ginko!” at the trees outside the Isabella Stuart Gardner Museum in Boston, and then her somewhat disappointing reaction to the paintings Lee wanted her to see. Liz, the ex-lover, is self-possessed and narcissistic. She threw things when angry, disappeared for days – and nights – at a time, had sex with other women, and was maddeningly oblivious to any of Lee’s relationship expectations. Lee called it quits and Liz moved out. But thoughts of Liz keep haunting Lee – and then she reappears, despite Lee’s friends’ best efforts to keep them apart. She’s changed, Liz says. She wants Lee back. Sounds like lesbian soap opera – and it might be, except for the depth and richness of the writing, the allusions to art and literature, the warmth, quirkiness, and humor of the community, the honest but discomforting discussion of disability politics, the loyalty of the dyke couple who want to support Lee as a writer, the family of origin complications. I read the book in one sitting – and I enjoyed it so much, I read it again a month later. In our interview, Mary Randall wouldn’t specify how autobiographical this novel is, but there are strong resonances: both “Lee” and Mary grew up in Long Island and moved to t

About the Author

Mary Randall has written a collection of short prose and poetry entitled THE GHOST OF STARBUCKVILLE DAM (RA Press, 2000), and a novel, NANCY NEVER MARRIED (1991, Xlibris 2002). She lives in the eastern Adirondacks of New York State, where she is snowed in for almost half the year and spends the rest of her time swimming in the river and/or reading at the campfire; a perfect life.