Breathless. After reading Lynn Crosbie's Dorothy L'Amour, that is what I am: simply breathless. I had to lie on the couch for a few minutes and just be, as I let the final words of the narrator wash over me like ice-cold waves, refreshing, reverberating. When I began the book, I knew it would be so...I fell in love with her poetry my last year at McGill, in Professor Lecker's Canadian Long Poem class...We read Queen Rat, Crosbie's new and selected poetry. She is in-your-face, gritty, bloody, harsh with descriptives but also starkly beautiful. I had dreamed of finding someone who wrote like that, publishing someone like that, being the person who was published who could write like that, and there she was staring back at me page after page. I even used her to formulate a thesis surrounding cannibalistic nature in her work, but my professor, a balding short man who hated all Americans and everything they stood for, though he admired my comments and thought processeses up to that point, ripped my paper to shreds in front of the entire seminar...brutally in fact such that other classmates(including a girl on which I had a crush)took to my defense. Anyway, I found out at that time that she had published one novel, Paul's Case, as well as several books of poetry. I searched for that novel far and wide, it had been out-of-print for a bit, especially due to its graphic and controversial subject matter. That is why I loved Crosbie so much, she wasn't afraid to push the envelope and all its contents, however dirty and revolting into your lap, laughing the whole time at your somewhat frightened/perturbed expression(or at least I imagine this so). So, doing my normal search on Amazon for stuff that I might like to read, I discovered about 6 monthes ago, that she had written another novel, called Dorothy L'Amour, it being a novel written in journal/first-person stream of consciousness style about the Canadian playmate Dorothy Stratten. It seemed like a much easier novel to come by...Well, I went digging...Every time I was in Canada I went looking for it, in used bookstores, in new bookstores, Book Warehouse, everywhere...I also went looking for her poetry, but I really really wanted to see how she wrote a novel. I even got a free Gwendolyn MacEwen book out of a long-winded discussion surrounding MacEwen(another one of my favorite poets)and Crosbie that I had with two lovely older gentlemen at a hole-in-the-wall used bookstore in the old part of Vancouver. I had absolutely no luck: it seemed like this enigma, this Holy Grail of novels that I felt that I was perhaps not worthy to find...I could have ordered it off Amazon, potentially, but I wanted to find it, to know that someone stocked it, to believe that someone else wanted to sell her to the world of readers...Well, it was all I talked about, I guess...I obsess over books that I can't find or have readily(earlier this year all my friends had to listen to me rant about not being able to find The Devil Wears Prada for at least a good few weeks)...Well, Keren, while we were in bed one night, asked me about Crosbie's novel, what the name was, etc. I didn't think anything of it, and I may have actually apologized for boring her with my praise of this feminist, but not so well-known, Canadian author. A few weeks later, a package was waiting at my mailbox when I got home from work...It was from a small bookstore in North Dakota...I was on the phone with Keren, and said, "I didn't order any books!" To which she replied "Maybe you did it in your sleep!" I responded back by saying, "If that's the case, I have really big fucking problems now!" After I got off the phone with her, I opened it up, and there was the book, my Grail. What a gift. I've thanked her everyday since I began it, and now that I've turned the final page and closed the cover, I thank you once more my love. Sheer brilliance, cover to cover. I wish I could write like that, I hope upon hope that someday I can. So heart-wrenching, so thought-provoking, so true. I don't necessarily think this book is for everyone, Crosbie has a different style (think Faulkner gone pop culture mixed with Sylvia Plath), but her prose, just like her poetry is just very real. It documents Stratten's life, from a young teen all the way to her tragic death at the hands of her estranged husband(all of the fact is true, common knowledge, so it's not like I'm blowing the ending or anything). Stratten is a sometime poet herself, and her thoughts and writing are lyrical in their disjointedness(this is possible with Crosbie, believe me). Oh! It's not like there's a really gripping plot, it's a memoir told through thought and memory, but wow...What is interesting, though is that all along, you believe it is Dorothy writing the memoir, though the last few pages were told from Hugh Hefner's point of view, trailing off, leading me to believe that perhaps(only perhaps, for that would seriously colour my reading of the novel very differently, and for Crosbie a proclaimed feminist to pull a twist like that? Huh!) he is the narrator/writer instead...This is when I wish other people read the books that I did, instead of going "Oh! That's interesting..." like most people tend to do, so I could discuss instead of pasting this drivel on the internet. But Crosbie is not everyone's cup of tea, think Jasmine: seductive and deep, with a dash of absinthe and a hint of crimson blood. I drew in every word of her prose, like it was oxygen, necessary to my living, but there are some quotes that I absolutely adored(as per usual)..."On a morning in August, I am awake at dawn, reading. I am looking for ways to better remember my childhood, my life until now. I watch the sun rise, its beauty diminished by contemplation. The sky is roseate, apricot, ice blue: a pasque flower, strewn with purplish bells. It is a chromatic phenomenon, emptied of meaning, confined by the conventions of sensation and form.[paragraph break] I think of how well writers evoke and situate their lives, each splinter and pang, the corresponding pastorals: locking themselves away with boxes of madeleines, becoming enormous with recollection" (Crosbie 21). In the next quote, Stratten is talking to Hefner: "We are sitting at the edge of the pool, wrapped in striped beach towels. I tell him that my memories are as isolated as little villages in glass globes. [paragraph break] When I write, I tell him, everyone's voices merge together in my memory, like iron filaments to a magnet" (Crosbie 43). And here too, talking to Hef again: "I still feel something for him, I told Hefner when he asked.[paragraph break] That is merely what remains of dead love, he said. How it clamours to be heard, predicating angrily, I made you. The cells and skin we discard periodically, that allow us to become someone new" (ibid 149). Finally, one of the last things Dorothy thinks about before she dies, when she's on the way to visiting the man who will soon kill her: "I think about failure. Those who have failed utterly, emanating a furious regret that is as palpable as pleasure, or success. [paragraph break] Shifting into neutral, I know that I emanate neither. Still, others gravitate to what I represent, measuring or breaking themselves against me" (ibid 161-2). Crosbie gives a Playboy playmate a charged, screamingly intellectual, full of woe retrospective on the world, the world which views her as an object, as filmy as the negligees that she poses in...Both Crosbie and Stratten are not just another pretty face, rather voices to be reckoned with. If one could reach an orgasm of the mind(and it is possible, I believe) here, I did.:)