Motion sickness

Lynne Tillman plunges us in at the deep end. It is the end of the sixties. A time of theatre cooperatives, underground films and men: Johnny, Charles, Jack, Michael, Piet, Marty: 'James wore a wool robe and I wore a Japanese kimono that was always open to him.' It is a long way from New York. 'I couldn't understand why a man would want a woman in pain. I wasn't sophisticated about sado-masochism.' Over the years things change, but not that much. 'In the morning Steve tells me he's into being macho.' 'How do you mean?' I ask 'Well', he says, 'it's sort of feminism for men.' Lynne Tillman is a modern explorer, a writer hankering recklessly after every experience confirming her as a woman - her fictions are as carelessly intimate as a phone call as carefully cut as a film. With a sharp eye for the bizarre, she writes of the woman who spends all day parking her three cars, of what Marilyn Monroe would say today, of the true events surrounding the life of the reluctant Hollywood star Frances Farmer. Like the humour of fellow New Yorkers, Woody Allen and Laurie Anderson, the humour of Lynne Tillman is bitter-sweet, it reminds us that, appearances to the contrary, in reality things only get worse.