The girl in the story is me

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I can’t tell you the name of Daphne Gottlieb’s new book — it’s too anatomical — but I can link to it right here. It’s a collection featuring nearly 30 stories that imagine the San Francisco performance poet and provocatrix in a variety of, er, compromising positions, written by a pretty good crew of West Coast underground literati, including Stephen Elliott, Ariel Gore, Bucky Sinister and Justin Chin.

There’s no denying that Gottlieb’s on to something with this project — a postmodern mash-up of truth and illusion that seeks to eclipse the line between how others see us and the way we see ourselves. The book had its genesis when she began to realize that some of her acquaintances were writing dirty stories about her (one appeared in Best American Erotica) that featured ‘[e]verything about me, it seems, except my underwear and my modesty.’ Eventually, Gottlieb put out a call for submissions; the result is this book.

I love the blurriness of this idea, the way fantasy and reality blend together until we don’t know what’s fiction or fact. Yet I’d be lying if I didn’t admit to some discomfort — not because of the sex but because of the narcissism.

Here we have an almost perfect metaphor for the conundrum of contemporary culture, with its look-at-me self-absorption, its sense that the artist is more important than the art.

In the end, that too is what Gottlieb’s book speaks to, whatever her intentions are.

David L. Ulin