Description
“The Girls Club is incredible—fierce, sexy and wise. Reading it will help you get through almost anything with more of your humanity intact. Plus, it’s a blast.” —Susan Stinson author of Venus of Chalk
“Riveting, gripping, unputdownable, The Girls Club grabbed me by the throat from the very first page . . . I’d follow this enormously talented writer to the ends of the earth.” —Lesléa Newman, author of Heather Has Two Mommies and The Reluctant Daughter
“One of our finest writers gives us this best yet portrait of a working class, lesbian coming out in the early 70s—Bellerose knows what to do with history—give it a body, desires, the wonder, fun, lust and longings of the human heart. Tough and tender, this is a family story in the truest sense. The Girls Club is simply a fine novel, which is a joy to read and Sally Bellerose is a writer of great skill and great heart.” —Joan Nestle, author of and co-founder of the Lesbian Herstory Archives Sisterhood.
The buzzword of the seventies, the key to women’s liberation. But for Catholic working class girls like Marie, Renee, and Cora Rose LaBarre, sisterhood is a word that covers a multitude of attitudes. They’re best friends, worst enemies, greatest supporters and biggest detractors. Set in the decade of opening doors, The Girls Club follows the three sisters as they love, argue, and struggle their way through adolescence to womanhood, taking in religion, illness, parenting, sexuality, drugs, and rock ‘n roll on the way.
Sally Bellerose was awarded a Fellowship in Literature from the National Endowment for the Arts based on an excerpt from this book. The manuscript won the Bywater Prize for Fiction and was a finalist for the James Jones Fellowship, the Thomas Wolfe Fiction Prize, and the Bellwether Endowment. Ms. Bellerose lives in western Massachusetts. This is her first novel.