I’m no stranger to writing about the 90s, particularly the cusp-of-millennium 90s, but doing it in flash fiction was something new. The Girl with the Black Lipstick is a book about a time and a place and a friendship that encompasses both the mundane and the transcendent. I started out thinking about the odd adventures people would have back when the internet didn’t overshadow us yet. The characters in this novella are as likely to have their noses in a book as they are to be strutting down a fashionable block in white denim booty shorts. (Fun fact–I had to go back and eliminate some of the white denim in this book, having subconsciously dressed my cast in so much that it seemed borderline cultish).
The hardest parts of this book project: sitting with all of the compiled flashes and deciding which to keep, proofing the typeset pages and finding all kinds of new connections (interesting ones, not just excess white denim), and cutting open the box to retrieve my first ever book of fiction (this was hard in a good way–so many emotions slicing open that tape).
And here she is! I’d love it if you would consider ordering a copy of The Girl with the Black Lipstick directly from Black Lawrence Press, or requesting one from your library.
As Sarah Freligh so kindly states, “This is a story that feels perfectly suited to the novella-in-flash, a reach back to grab the fragments of who we were in the final year of the twentieth century, to hold them to the light in an attempt to understand what peculiar threads connected us.”
A bit about the book:
Against the backdrop of a boozy, restless late-90s Chicago, creative writing graduate student Mary Van Pelt and her eccentric roommate navigate the collision between party life, domestic harmony, and academic ambition in The Girl with the Black Lipstick. Mary Biddinger’s novella in linked flash stories conjures outrageous fashion and the oddest of odd jobs, sparing no detail when immersing readers in bedrooms, dancefloors, lakeshore beaches, and university seminars.
Set before smartphones filled every pocket, The Girl with the Black Lipstick chronicles a bygone era of performance and spectacle. Biddinger offers vivid, surreal vignettes told in the heat of the moment or recalled as we follow Van Pelt from her first days of graduate school into life as a tenured professor. Our heroine and her roommate overcome predicaments and deepen their bond while simultaneously ignoring and obsessing over the future, blissfully unaware of challenges ahead until those challenges arrive. The Girl with the Black Lipstick is a tale of deep creativity and found family, paying tribute to those who support our youthful selves in unexpected ways.
Perhaps you need a soundtrack to accompany these flashes? Please enjoy the official Spotify playlist for The Girl with the Black Lipstick.
Mary Biddinger 