Bogeywoman

Front Cover
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, Sep 6, 2011 - Fiction - 304 pages
A Los Angeles Times Best Book or the Year
 
National Book Award Winner Jaimy Gordon’s bold and daring coming of age novel combines the teenaged angst of Catcher in the Rye with the humor and tragedy of Girl, Interrupted.
 
Ursie Koderer knows herself to be a monster--doomed to be different from other girls--very different.  When she’s discovered cutting herself at camp, she goes AWOL, and lands in a Baltimore psychiatric hospital. Ursie, now known as the Bogeywoman, joins up with the other misfits on the adolescent ward. They start a bughouse rock group, steal a nitrous oxide machine. As a mental patient Ursie is a success. But then she’s implicated in the accidental burning of a friend. Locked away, the Bogeywoman meets the beautiful, mysterious Doctor Zuk, a woman psychiatrist from somewhere east of the Urals. Their affair is the main event in this gorgeous novel of love, crime, liberation, and flight to something like a new world.
 

Contents

Tough Paradise for Girls
3
Buggywoman
42
Miles from Madame Zuk
80
Fallen Among Ayrabbers I 13
113
A Quietroom of Ones Own
152
Blab to Foofer
172
Flight to CaramelCreamistan
223
How Love Got Me Out of There
277
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About the author (2011)

Jaimy Gordon’s Lord of Misrule won the National Book Award in 2010, and was also a finalist for the Pen/Faulkner Award. Bogeywoman, her third novel, was on the Los Angeles Times list of Best Books for 2000. Her second novel, She Drove Without Stopping, brought her an Academy Award for her fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She has been a fellow of the Fine Arts Work Center, Provincetown, and the Bunting (now Radcliffe) Institute at Harvard. She teaches at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo and in the Prague Summer Program for Writers.

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