A Girl Becomes a Comma Like That By Lisa Glatt
Reviewed by Felicia C. Sullivan

A mother dying of breast cancer who wants to love, a daughter with a revolving door into her bedroom but a Beware sign on her heart, a desperate, acerbic friend whose lips puff like down pillows and beds a man because she likes that he likes her, a woman who obsesses over her husband’s infidelity, and a teenage girl with moxie who lends out her body like a library book while her father pines over the mother that left them behind: Elizabeth, Rachel, Angela, Emma, and Georgia are the central figures in Lisa Glatt’s auspicious novel-in-stories, A Girl Becomes a Comma Like That.

The novel shifts between the women’s points of view from 1997-2000, all bearing the weight of someone leaving. At the center is poetry teacher, Rachel Spark, who has been coping with her chipper mother, Elizabeth’s bought with terminal breast cancer. For over six years, Rachel has remained in her mother’s home, ferreting Elizabeth to chemo sessions, cosmetic surgery and leech therapy all amidst Rachel’s own unraveling. A bevy of men haunt her bedrooms with their accents, their stories and finally, after an unprotected one-night stand with a Brit and a mother who creeps quickly towards death, Rachel finally confronts loss and the possibility of life after her mother.

During the day, Emma Bloom lectures girls about safer sex, sees girls with round bellies, STD cancers that fester and spread, infecting a girl’s body and stands side-by-side with the woman she found kissing her husband (a man who studies bats) and wonders about love, what does it imply, who does it implicate and how it is possible that one can love and be comforted too soon. Most compelling is Georgia. A teenager alone with a brother who longs for escape from their cold home, a despondent father, and a mother who has taken up house with another – Georgia’s body is this thing – this empty thing that gives her power.

Bodies are merely an assortment of parts that can be manipulated and molded to get one through one’s day. A breast implant provides posture, balance – a mouth is an oracle to quiet with cruel words or silence through oral sex, – Lisa Glatt’s debut is all at once an uncomfortable and unflinching look about women’s complicated relationship with their bodies. Many of the characters bear the weight of abandonment by their loved ones and often are left to raise themselves. Disease with respect to relationships and the body is so intricately linked which raises an eye to the close relationship between sex, death and love.

Glatt’s dialogue is authentic, prose sparkles and many of the passages are absolutely heartbreaking. The structure is a bit rough at times with the reader having to flip back and forth to locate oneself in time (same with long passages that switch between present/past tense), however, that aside, A Girl Becomes a Comma Like That is honest, pensive and uncompromising.

Visit Lisa Glatt’s website.