About The Book

A tour-de-force from one of the most daring and sensuous young writers in America, Suicide Blonde is the intensely erotic story of a young woman’s sexual and psychological odyssey, which Vanity Fair has called “a provocative tour through the dark side.” Jesse, a beautiful twenty-nine-year-old, is adrift in San Francisco’s demimonde of sexually ambiguous, drug-taking outsiders, desperately trying to sustain a connection with her bisexual boyfriend Bell. She becomes caretaker and confidante to Madame Pig, a grotesque, besotted recluse. Jesse also meets Madison, Pig’s daughter or lover or both, who uses others’ desires for her own purposes, and who leads Jesse into a world beyond all boundaries. A sensational novel published in nine languages, Suicide Blonde is a startling, knowing expurgation of identity and time, as well as the common, and now tainted, language of sexuality.

Praise

“A shocking and electrifying journey into the inferno of sexual obsession.”—Details

“Erotic . . . beautifully crafted prose.”—Time

“The diary of a death wish . . . Suicide Blonde doles out some bitter, valuable lessons.”—The New Yorker

“Hallucinatory, dystopian . . . a disturbing, poisonous fable of the dire consequences of derailed passion.”—The New York Times

‘steinke has a diabolical grasp of the willfulness of decadence, the ambiguity of sexuality, and the transmutability of identity. . . . [Suicide Blonde is an] electrifying tale with the ambience of a Warhol or John Waters film. Edgy and powerful stuff.”—Booklist

‘suicide Blonde is in the tradition of Djuna Barnes, Georges Bataille, and Marguerite Duras. It’s about . . . the part of town where you’re not supposed to go, beauty where there shouldn’t be any.”—Robert Olmstead