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A Globe and Mail Best Book of 2016Double Teenage tells the story of Celine and Julie, two girls coming of age in the 1990s in a desert town close to the US-Mexico border. Starting from their shared love of theatre, the girls move into a wider world that shimmers with intellectual and artistic possibility, but at the same time, is dense with threat.
This unrelenting novel shines a spotlight on paradoxes of Western culture. It asks impossible questions about the media's obsession with sexual violence as it twins with a social unwillingness to look at real pain. It asks what it feels like to be a girl, simultaneously a being and a thing, feeling in a marketplace. Wherever they are--whether in a dance club in El Paso or an art lecture in Vancouver--these characters brush against maddening contradiction and concealed brutality.
This is a portrait of the recent past, seen through the cloudy lens of now. Murphy traces the lives of friends struggling within self-destructive realities. Part bildungsroman, part performance, part passionate essay, part magic spell,
Double Teenage ultimately offers a way to see through violence into an emotionally alive place beyond the myriad traps of girlhood.
About the author
JONI MURPHY was born in New Mexico lives in New York. Her debut novel,
Double Teenage, was named one of
The Globe and Mail's 100 Best Books of 2016. Her second novel,
Talking Animals, was published in 2020.
