Crybaby Butch (Katie Belanger)

Title: Crybaby Butch
Author: Judith Frank
Publisher: Firebrand books
Pages: 416
Where was the book found? Barns & Noble
Brief Summary:
"Crybaby Butch" tells the story of two women, Anna and Chris, who meet in an adult literacy class. Both women identify as butch, though because they are from two different generations that identity means different things to each of them. Despite their difference in age, class, experience, and personality, Anna attempts to connect with her student Chris even though the desire to help this woman takes control of her life. Anna tries to have her own butch identity reaffirmed by bonding with a 'real' butch from the bad old days. While Anna and Chris circle each other warily, the novel also introduces us to the lives of Anna's other students, her love life, Chris's troubled relationship with her partner of twenty years, and information on how to teach reading and writing to adult students.

Audience of book: The book is for mature audiences, preferably adults.
Authors writing style: Frank’s writing style is primarily in the second and third person, switching from Anna’s perspective of her own identity to classroom scenes where the perspective of the story is jumped from person to person inside the room. This is done to show a 360 degree view of the learning experience inside the room and what people are really thinking when they are in a classroom.
“Chris dictated, peeking at the words Anna was writing down in neat print letters, as though she’d been told she wasn’t allowed to look. When she was finished dictating, Anna asked, “You a Harry Caray fan?”
“Can’t stand him,” Chris said.
Anna grinned, giving her the thumbs up. From here on she had a script, and that relaxed her.” [70]



Three passages that struck me some way:
1. “Anna forced herself to look at her. It was hard to do, she was such a complicated sight; it was like peeking at the sun during an eclipse, wondering if it would really burn out your retinas.” [67]
This passage stuck with me because it reminds me of how hard it is to look at someone JUST like you. It’s like you are trying to make out how they are different to you and yet how similar they are despite age gaps.
2. “The image wavered in her sight undefined for a moment. It is a weird slice into vision’s fabric, the he-she, no matter how accommodating that vision is. Looking at this one, Anna felt herself hovering just above gender’s runway, feeling an exquisite irritability as she waited for the wheels to touch down, bouncing and giving off sparks. Wow, an old time butch she thought.” [42]
This passage showed me Anna’s first feelings seeing a butch much older than her. It felt like when she was looking at this woman, she saw something just mind boggling, like a mirage that she could not comprehend.
3. “But then again, Anna and Terry had both been braced by plenty of parental homophobia. Terry, whose mother refuses to acknowledge any of her lovers, loved to riff on their telephone conversations to her friends:
“How are you?”
“Jancie and I are fine, we’re doing very well.”
A long pause; Terry would mime looking into the phone receiver.
“How’s work?” her mother would finally ask.
“Pretty good, although Janice just started her new job, so things are a little crazy around here.”” [28]
This passage made me laugh a bit due to the mother’s homophobic behavior to her daughter. It reminds me of all of the conversations I had with my grandmother on this issue when she was homophobic herself.
How I interacted with the book.
I interacted a great deal with this novel because it spoke about the femme/butch relationship dynamics in ways I have not occurred to me. This novel made me relate to my own life and how hard it is for a butch to live with their head high without taking into account how strangers view them. This novel was an excellent source to view an event through the eyes of a variety of people, to see what really goes on in a classroom rather than just what’s in front of the students. This novel spoke to me throughout the story because of how it concerned how I live my own life with the adult concepts on it.