A Girl Becomes a Comma Like That

by Lisa Glatt

Book Overview

Rachel Spark is an irreverent, sexually eager, financially unstable thirty-year-old college instructor who moves back home when her mother is diagnosed with terminal breast cancer. As she tries to ease her mother, a perpetually cheerful woman, toward the inevitable, Rachel turns from one man to the next -- sometimes comically, sometimes catastrophically -- as if her own survival depended upon it.
Ella Bloom, an adult student in Rachel's...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0743257766
• ISBN13: 9780743257763
• Release Date: June 2005
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Length: 304 Pages
• Weight: 1.19 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.7" x 8.2"

Customer Reviews

Honest, frank, and poetic

I bought this book because I loved the title, and the story line seemed passable (I was trying to get away from the dark horror I usually read). What I found was a novel that stired my soul and made me re-read passages so that what Glatt was saying would stick to my bones. I rarly find a book that hits this close to home. Stories about three seperate woman whose lives are linked by association the book skips back and forth between years of Rachel's mother's cancer. Rachel herself is an english professor who is, let me be gental here, sexually loose. Alot of her "relationships" have more to do with her pain over her mother than anything else. The mother is a constant source of wit and postiviness in this book where the other characters are more at a downward spiral emotionally in their lives. The line "a girl becomes a comma like that" was Rachel talking about how one girl (her in the example she's giving) is just the pausing point for a guy inbetween one to the next. That hurt so much to read someone write that, but it was so beautifully put I didn't care. A must read for any female who can't find her place in a relationship, or sometimes in herself.

tragic beauty

Lisa Glatt's book is not chick lit or anything close to it. If you want to read about shopping and fashion and silly girl crushes, go elsewhere. This is serious literature, about cancer and looming death and unavoidable loneliness, and the dark, sad, sometimes sleezy, places depressed women go to hide as a result. Glatt is an honest writer. Beautifully honest. In fact, she makes tragedy almost appealing.

HONEST and WISE and OH SO GOOD...

We all want our lives to work out a certain way. To be a certain way. But life is messy. And how we handle things often shows we have no idea what we're doing or how to make things better. The women in "A Girl Becomes A Comma Like That" are no exception. And that's what makes them so incredibly relateable. So incredibly real. They make mistakes. They reach out looking for answers in places they may never get them. They act inappropriately like we all do at times. Because insecurity plagues us all in times of crisis--- If only we had someone like Glatt writing our lines for us in such an evocative way, we may get through those times a little better. And feel alot better about ourselves. What Glatt understands and shows us so compellingly is that even smart women do things that don't seem to make sense. And end up in places that don't seem to make sense. These women-- Rachel, Ella, Elizabeth and Georgia don't have the luxury to define themselves with designer outfits and how rich of a husband they can land. They're too real and like most of us, too complex. The journey we go on with them is to places most writers shy away from. But Glatt takes us there in such a full, rich and powerful way that by the time we're done we see just how substantial that can be.

Absurdly, amazingly great.

The following is an excerpt from my column, a monthly review of first novels published in the New York Journal News. I'm posting it here because Glatt's novel is among the best debuts I've ever read - it deserves all the accolades and praise it has received, and then some - and I think everyone should know about it. Lisa Glatt's first novel (she previously published two collections of poetry), entitled A Girl Becomes A Comma Like That, is an accomplished, elegant, inky-black tragicomedy that raises gallows humor to a heartrending art form. Its heroine, Rachel Spark, moves home to care for her terminally ill mother, a dynamic, ruthlessly optimistic woman who seems to be coping with the situation far better than her daughter; Rachel, a thirtyish creative writing teacher adrift professionally and personally, is absolutely devastated at the prospect of her mother's death, and attempts to circumnavigate her grief by sleeping with one inappropriate man after another. Into this central narrative, by turns poignant and uproarious, Glatt intersperses the stories of three other young women: Rachel's friend Angela, a hapless, socially inept young woman, simultaneously tough and clinging, whose allergies occasionally cause her lips to swell to epic proportions, making it difficult for her to breathe or speak; Ella, a sensitive college undergrad and student of Rachel's, who discovers her new husband is having an affair; and Georgia, a sexually and intellectually precocious teenage girl-and an inauspiciously regular client of the Planned Parenthood clinic where Ella works, and which Rachel visits to have an abortion. All of the characters, whether treated briefly or at greater length, are distinct, dimensional, and eminently believable. Glatt extracts a sweet pathos from the almost arbitrary, near-miss quality of their uneasy friendships, but what connects these women one to another is less important, and of less interest to Glatt, that what keeps them apart from each other and from anyone else: the loneliness that they have in common, a profound, ineffable lack that each tries and fails to fill with sex. As Rachel muses in the line from which the title is taken, "A girl becomes a comma like that, with wrong boy after wrong boy; she becomes a pause, something quick before the real thing." Love is what each of these women craves-authentic, abiding love, the real thing-but cannot or will not permit herself to have. Each endures the effects of ordinary damage that has been magnified and warped by sorrow and happenstance; each is, in her own way, spun out and dizzied by the centripetal forces of self-destructive compulsions. These portraits are, deft, wise, beautifully complex, and drawn with a light, even playful touch; the novel is bracingly unsentimental. Glatt does not stoop to easy cleverness or coy ironies, and she offers her characters neither pity nor condemnation (for example, she takes care to juxtapose the main characters' emotional pathologies wi