Monica Drake’s debut novel, Clown Girl, is due out in February 2007 with an introduction by Chuck Palahniuk. In this darkly comic novel, Clown Girl lives in Baloneytown, a neighborhood so run down and penniless that drugs, balloon animals and even rubber chickens contribute to the local currency. Against a backdrop of petty crime, Clown Girl struggles to find her place in the world of high art; she has dreams of greatness and calls on the masters, Charlie Chaplin, Kafka and da Vinci for inspiration. But all is not art in her life: in an effort to support herself and her under-employed performance-artist boyfriend, she is drawn into the world of paying jobs, and finds herself unwittingly turned into a "corporate clown," trapped in a cycle of meaningless, high paid gigs which veer dangerously close, then closer to prostitution. Using the lens of clown life to illuminate a struggle between artistic integrity and an economic reality, Monica Drake has created a novel that embraces the high comedy of early film stars—most notably Chaplin and W.C. Fields. At the same time Drake manages to raise questions about issues of class, gender, economics and prejudice. This debut novel is an stunning blend of the bizarre, the humorous, and the gritty. The novel resists easy classification, but is completely accessible to a general audience.

From the introduction by Chuck Palahniuk:

Welcome to the book of my arch enemy. “Rival” would be a nicer word, but let’s be honest. In 1991, in Tom Spanbauer’s kitchen, where our whole workshop of beginning writers still fit around his dinky kitchen table, every week Monica Drake was the star. The stories she read to us … about sitting all night locked inside the Portland Art Museum, alone to guard the ancient mummy of a Chinese empress, staring at a dish filled with the preserved contents of the mummy’s stomach—mostly ancient pumpkin seeds. As Monica talked about being locked behind steel gates and barred doors and bulletproof Plexiglas, the rest of Tom’s students, we’d forget to breathe.

Writing this introduction, I’m not doing an old friend a favor—I’m paying a decade-old debt. This isn’t charity or flattery—this is honesty. Writers are nothing if not rivals, but competition as good as Monica Drake is a blessing. Clown Girl is more than a great book. Clown Girl is its own reality.

We should all have an arch enemy this brilliant

Monica Drake has an MFA from the University of Arizona and teaches at the Pacific NW College of Art. She is a contributor of reviews and articles to The Oregonian, The Stranger, and the Portland Mercury and her fiction has appeared in the Beloit Fiction Review, Threepenny Review, The Insomniac Reader, and others. She has been the recipient of an Arizona Commission on the Arts Award, the Alligator Juniper Prize in Fiction, and a Millay Colony Fellowship, and was a Tennessee Williams scholar at Sewanee Writers Workshop.

Monica Drake has scheduled a number of readings in promotion of Clown Girl.

Founded in 2001, Hawthorne Books publishes American literary fiction and narrative non-fiction with a commitment to offering international titles as well. We promote emerging writers, cultivate notable literary figures, and strive to present international voices to our readers.

Comments (0)

Subscribe to this comment's feed

Recommend this article...