Passing Remarks

Helen Hodgman

Ballantine Pub., 1996 - Fiction - 215 pages

Two things happened to Rosemary that early summer;
she won $30,000 playing Keno at the Hakoah Club and
she fell in love with a woman much younger than herself.
Thus, laden with luck, she entered her fifty-first year. . . .

When middle-aged, academic Rosemary meets twenty-seven-year-old Billie--a woman with a tough bike and an even tougher attitude--she goes weak at the knees. Yet when Billie speeds off on a soul-searching bender through the Australian outback, Rosemary is left to ponder love and longevity, and weather a few adventures of her own.
Cooped up for the summer with the eccentric Daphne--who is busy transforming her body into a tattooed biography of her mad mother's life--Rosemary unwittingly winds up with a leading role in a lesbian porn flick, loses her car to a shears-wielding murderer, and still finds time to compost her garden and miss Billie to no end. Yet as each woman's path twists through a hilarious comedy of manners and mishaps, one fact remains: relationships lie in the sometimes capable--sometimes careless--hands of coincidence.

What people are saying

PASSING REMARKS

User Review  - Jane Doe - Kirkus

Intimations of immortality as a 50-year-old Australian woman in love with a much younger woman are lightened by stylish writing and deft comedic touchesin award-winning Hodgman's first US appearance ...

Passing remarks

User Review  - Not Available - Book Verdict

Set in Australia, this novel--partly a love story but mostly a thrill-seeking, quixotic adventure tale--is filled with a cast of eccentric, shallow, drifting characters who look for an anchor, a ...

About the author

Hodgman was born in Scotland and emigrated to Tasmania. She returned to London to live for 10 years and worked at a variety of jobs to support her writing career.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Passing Remarks
• Author: Helen Hodgman
• Edition: reprint
• Publisher: Ballantine Pub., 1996
• Original from: the University of Virginia
• Digitized: Aug 20, 2008
• ISBN: 0345417739, 9780345417732
• Length: 215 pages
• Subjects: Fiction / Lesbian