Nolan, Monica

PERSONAL:

Female.

CAREER:

Writer, filmmaker, teacher. Producer and director of short films, including Lesbians Who Date Men, World of Women, Chuckie, Laura, Showgirlfriends, and Ashley, 22.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Awards for World of Women, Chicago Lesbian and Gay Film Festival and Imaginaria Festival, Turin, Italy; Diagram Prize for Oddest Title of the Year, Bookseller, 2003, for The Big Book of Lesbian Horse Stories.

WRITINGS:

(With Alisa Surkis) The Big Book of Lesbian Horse Stories, Kensington Books (New York, NY), 2002.

Lois Lenz, Lesbian Secretary, Kensington Books (New York, NY), 2007.

Contributor to periodicals, including Bitch.

SIDELIGHTS:

Monica Nolan is a filmmaker and writer whose first book, written with Alisa Surkis, is The Big Book of Lesbian Horse Stories. The pulp fiction collection includes eight stories of women whose lives include an important horse, and each story is set in a different place and time that is important to lesbian history. They include a 1940s mob-controlled race track, the 1960s East Village, and 1980s Florida. Each story has a similar plot, in that a young woman moves with her horse to a new place to make a fresh start, finds new love, enjoys the thrill of victory as she wins a race or finds a new career as a jockey, trainer, or other traditionally male profession, and lives happily ever after, all without help from any man.

Anna Simon, who reviewed the volume for the Portland Mercury Online, noted that, because the women of these stories care about each other, "you can really get into it. Probably not a book for guys (unless they think they're sensitive), but appropriate for all Bust-era girls."

Nolan's debut novel, Lois Lenz, Lesbian Secretary, is set in the 1950s. It pays tribute to lesbian pulp of that era, as well as including homosexuality, drugs, and communism, which Nolan considers "the three big scares of the Fifties," according to Gary Kramer, writing in the San Francisco Bay Times.

When she graduates high school, cheerleader Lois Lenz leaves small town Oak Grove to work in Bay City, where she rents a room at the Magdalena Arms, a boardinghouse that has seen better days, and which is home to a number of lesbian career girls. She leaves behind her best friend, Faye, with whom she has taken the first steps toward a same-sex relationship, as well as a boyfriend who has been having an affair with the only black girl in their school. He writes to her after the move, asking for the jazz albums he can't get in Oak Grove. She becomes the personal secretary to Mrs. Pierson, a tough advertising executive, a job arranged by her guidance counselor.

Nolan integrates into the story the expectations thrust upon women of the time, including domestication and submission. The reader learns what it was like to be a secretary, taking dictation in shorthand and typing away on a manual typewriter, while always coming to work fashionably dressed. Lois learns independence from the other women at the Magdalena Arms, where they attempt to solve the disappearance of the young woman who had previously lived in Lois's room. They also help Lois become more comfortable with her sexuality, and Lois enters into sexual relationships with many of the female characters of the story. A Publishers Weekly contributor wrote that Nolan "tries to do for the growing lesbian pulp genre what Hammett and Chandler did for the private dick novels of the 1940s."

Judith Katz reviewed Lois Lenz, Lesbian Secretary in the Lambda Book Report, noting that it is: "More pin-up than porno…. Nolan's plot spins out of control toward its finish, but by the time you get there, who cares?! There's barely a false move in her writing, which is funny, sexy, sometimes silly, and always sharp."

Nolan was interviewed by Kristin A. Smith for Curve. Smith asked where she got her inspiration for the novel, and Nolan replied that "it comes from the fact that I really love lesbian pulp. And I find them totally enjoyable, even in this day and age. I guess I'm kind of retro; I have retro tastes anyway. And so I basically wanted to do something that was totally lesbian pulpy but imagining a lesbian pulp in a world where internalized homophobia wasn't a problem …. So that was kind of my goal in writing it—to sort of preserve all of the really fun elements of the pulp, but to get rid of the ones that are not so fun when you reread them."

In an interview with Kramer, Nolan disclosed that she would like to place the character of Rod, the closeted high school boy, in a future novel. Kramer wrote: "While it would be a challenge for Nolan to pen a gay male pulp novel, she announces, ‘I read a lot of gay fiction. It would be fun and it would be different.’" Kramer concluded by writing that fans of this book "will have a hard time waiting for the next installment."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Bookseller, December 5, 2003, "Horseplay Title Wins Diagram," p. 70.

Entertainment Weekly, August 3, 2007, Katia Hetter, review of Lois Lenz, Lesbian Secretary, p. 75.

Lambda Book Report, fall, 2007, Judith Katz, review of Lois Lenz, Lesbian Secretary, p. 34.

Publishers Weekly, June 11, 2007, review of Lois Lenz, Lesbian Secretary, p. 40.

ONLINE

Curve Online,http://www.curvemag.com/ (April 15, 2008), Kristin A. Smith, "We Love Monica Nolan's Pulp Fiction," author interview.

Portland Mercury Online,http://www.portlandmercury.com/ (April 15, 2008), Anna Simon, review of The Big Book of Lesbian Horse Stories.

San Francisco Bay Times Online,http://www.sfbaytimes.com/ (November 22, 2007), Gary Kramer, "SF Author Writes Lesbian Pulp," author interview and review of Lois Lenz, Lesbian Secretary.