The Tamesis
There’s no substitute for experiencing the indie grunge scene of the early 2000s, but reading Benny Peterson’s beautifully illustrated and delightfully queer new novel, Maidenhead— now published by Penguin Random House — is perhaps the closest you can get to truly running wild and free in the very specific world of DC Punk.
For the latest issue FashionIn the must-read series, Peterson talks about fellow writers whose work most made them want to write, from Carrie Brownstein to Andrea Lawlor to Raven Leilani. Below, Peterson details their various inspirations Maidenhead the following.
girl by Blake Nelson
girl, First published in 1994, the book tells the story of Andrea Marr, a lonely suburban teen in the Pacific Northwest who becomes involved in Portland’s burgeoning punk scene, where she finds community and a complicated first love with a charismatic singer. I must have read it a dozen times in high school, when I was a lonely suburban teen longing for community, confused about my sexuality and dreaming of being smitten with a sexy, tortured musician. This book is forever etched in my heart (and anyone who has read this book will know this) Maidenhead read and loved girl Thirty years ago), I dreamed of its raw, visceral immediacy.
celine by Brock Cole
There’s another novel I read in high school that changed me forever, and, just as a side note, it’s another wonderful 90’s (technically, 1989) novel about girlhood written by a man! eponymous heroine celine is an artist and queer-coded weirdo; the novel has no plot and the stakes are fairly low, just Celine wandering through life and observing things. What struck me most (besides a nightmarish scene in which Céline’s friend vomited on her own sweatshirt at a party) was how seriously Céline took her art. She never doubted herself; Her identity as an artist is her most fixed thing. As a young person full of doubts, I found this a bit shocking, and I thought about this (artistic self-doubt and the lack of artistic self-doubt, as teenage girls experience) when I was conceiving the two protagonists in The Movie. Virgo.
