My Lesbian Husband

Barrie Jean Borich's memoir of her 14-year marriage is a subtle exploration of gender and the intricacies of butch-femme desire. In dense, lyrical paragraphs, My Lesbian Husband describes Borich's first attraction to her partner, Linnea, and the slow building of their life together in a decaying neighborhood in Minneapolis. Borich traces both the pleasures and the wrenching difficulties of trying to construct a long-term union in the absence not only of legal and social support but of everything that our aunts and uncles and parents take for granted: "names for their union in every language, the weddings of a square-chested prince and a big-busted, cinch-waisted princess at the end of every Disney movie, every Shakespeare comedy, not to mention Mary and Joseph, Hera and Zeus, and those little bride and groom figurines they have saved from their wedding cakes." This is as sharply observed and well-written a memoir as Jan Clausen's Apples and Oranges, but a valentine rather than a valediction. --Regina Marler