Can a two-timing, Twelve-stepping, twenty-something temptress find happiness with a nun?
Claire McMinn has three goals: to stay sober, to stay away from sex, and to get into film school. As Verge begins, her last goal is jeopardized when a past affair with a professor’s wife catches up with her and she is kicked out of his class. In her quest to obtain a video camera to complete the course work on her own, she is introduced to Sister Hilary, a nun who runs a local community center. Claire gets the camera, a volunteer job at Sister Hilary’s agency, and a tangle of complications.
Will her feelings for the nun threaten her sobriety-imposed hiatus from sex? Can she finish her project in the presence of such an alluring distraction? Or will she fall back with Shelly, an ex-girlfriend now fleeing the vestiges of an abusive relationship? And what about Rita, the professor’s wife, the dalliance from Claire’s past that crashes into her present? Can Claire stay sober, sexually and otherwise?
“Verge is powerful, quirky, and fresh. It’s a tale not so much of recovery as of regeneration, and the restorative, sustaining power of storytelling itself.
Z Egloff creates a rich, inclusive world and a heroine who’s one of the most endearingly fallible characters I’ve met in a long time.”
—Alison Bechdel, author of Fun Home
“In jaunty, hilarious prose, Z Egloff gives us one of the most compelling and touching comic heroines of our time. The charismatic, filmmaking, boy-girl Claire has stopped drinking only to face the wreckage of her past, the impossibility of her family, and the anxiety of sex – in particular all the wrong feelings for a certain “woman religious.” Verge is that rare thing, a comic literary novel with heart and depth. Who knew that recovery, nuns, and videotaping could be such a blast!”
—Michelle Huneven, author of Jamesland
"With Verge, Z Egloff enters the ring of lesbian fiction with the assurance of an old hand. Using deft strokes, Egloff puts her extremely likeable protagonist— a film student and recovering alcoholic—through a gauntlet of difficulties that are by turns hilarious, sad, moving, romantic, and sometimes quite heated. This is a talented writer I hope we hear from again, and soon."
— Carol Anshaw, author of Aquamarine
“A wry story of confronting your demons, Verge has heart and wit and intelligence.”
— Emma Donoghue, author of The Sealed Letter and Slammerkin
Verge started in the shower. It’s true. That’s where I first had the idea of writing a novel about a nun. I didn’t know anything at that point other than: nun. Well, that and she’d be a lesbian. Or have some sort of repression around her sexuality, which would be a queer sexuality.
At first, in the brainstorming phase, I thought I might write the novel from the nun’s point of view. But in doing my research on nuns, I began to feel I could better capture the perspective of the person who fell in love with the nun. This tactic also gave me a chance to bring in an alternative viewpoint with respect to both spirituality and sexuality. Good ol’ tension and conflict.
As for the writing of the book itself, I’m an outliner, so I made lots and lots of notes about all the possible outcomes and directions of the story before I began the first draft. Claire, the main character, started to emerge as this wise-ass rebel person. I didn’t really intend her to be that way, but that’s what happened. Everything always seems to turn out differently once you dive into it. In rewrites of the novel I attempted to make Claire more likable, as this was a problem with some of my early readers. But there was this feisty energy in her that wanted to clash with Sister Hilary’s. Even after exposing more of Claire’s vulnerabilities, that kick ass attitude was still there. It made the novel more fun to write. And it gave me more to work with in exploring the relationship between Claire and Hilary, as their interactions became about both contrast and finding common ground.
I wrote Verge pretty quickly. I didn’t have much of a life at the time – a half-life, let’s say – and I was writing four hours a day, seven days a week. So I popped out the first draft in a little over three months. But there were lots of rewrites after that. Tons.
Finally, I arrived at the point where, as far as I was concerned, the book was as good as it could be. Around this time, I had a strong sense that I should send it to a GLBT publishing house. I thought it might be better to start with a smaller, specialty press. So I sent it out. Thing is, I only sent it to four of them. All of whom either rejected it or never replied. A few months after this, I had some discouraging feedback from another novelist and basically gave up. I put Verge on the shelf and began another novel.
Enter Anne Matlack Evans. Anne is a writing teacher and the director of the Napa Valley Writer’s Conference. I met her in the summer of 2005 at a small writer’s conference in Northern California. She loved Verge and encouraged me to keep moving toward publication. That was a big moment for me. It was the first time that someone who didn’t know me liked my work. I remember looking behind me as she was speaking, thinking maybe she was talking to someone else. She wasn’t.
So I took her advice and sent the novel out to lots and lots of agents. Like, forty. Through that process I found my agent, Angela Rinaldi, who then sent the book out to lots and lots of New York publishers. All of whom passed on it. The read-between-the-lines sentiment was that it was “too gay.” Dude. What’s too gay? Who knows? Bottom line, I gave up again. Until my friend Renee Owen told me not to. (“What?” she said. “You’re just going to quit? Why not send it to the smaller presses? What have you got to lose?”)
So I did. Yeah yeah. And I have to say, I had a good feeling about Bywater right away. Even as I was sending them the manuscript, they felt like a great match for Verge, given the other books they had published. And my buddy Juan, who’s super intuitive, had a similar good feeling. He was right.
Getting the email from Bywater that they wanted to publish my book was an awesome moment. I’d been writing fiction for almost seven years at that point, not really sure where it was all going, and it turned out it was going here. To getting Verge out there (as it were) and embarking on the next leg of the trip.
Paperback: 280 pages
Publisher: Bywater Books
(February 1, 2009)
ISBN-10: 1932859683
ISBN-13: 978-1932859683