Bywater Books Releases Paula Martinac’s The Ada Decades

One woman reaches her own form of Southern womanhood—compassionate, resilient, principled, lesbian.

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A girl from a Carolina mill family isn’t supposed to strive for a career, but Ada Shook graduates from college on a scholarship and lands a plum job as a school librarian. As the 1950s South rocks with turbulence, Ada finds herself caught in the ugly fight to integrate the Charlotte, NC public schools. At the same time, she makes friends with Cam Lively, a teacher who challenges her to reexamine her narrow upbringing. The two young women fall in love and throw in their lot together, despite their underlying fear of being found out and fired.

Over seven decades, Ada is witness to the racism laced through her Southern city, the paradox of religion as both comfort and torment, and the survival networks created by gay people. Eleven interconnected stories cover the sweep of one woman’s personal history as she reaches her own form of Southern womanhood – compassionate, resilient, principled, and lesbian.

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“In this time of America’s seemingly shrinking public heart, comes The Ada Decades, showing us that history is the life of the heart, of a region, of social struggles, of desire trying to surface with dignity. When I turned the last page of this compelling and effortless novel, when I had to say goodbye to Ada and Cam and the North Carolinian streets they walked for over seven decades, I kept hoping there was more. Martinac is a wondrous story teller who does not duck the hard stuff, but finds the grace in her characters that makes all our lives more possible. Eminently readable, historically insightful, realistically romantic. For the new lesbian and the old, for all, Cam and Ada will stay in your hearts. We need them now more than ever, and we need this writer, Paula Martinac.”—Joan Nestle, Lambda Award winning writer and editor, and a founder of the Lesbian Herstory Archives

“To have a Paula Martinac novel first thing in 2017 is necessary. Her urbane lesbian feminist fiction keeps us going—and by “us,” I mean queers, dykes, butches, femmes, GNCs, queens, sissies, faggots, bulldaggers, and all the rest who may be under attack in coming four years.” —Cheryl Clarke, poet and author of By My Precise Haircut

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PAULA MARTINAC is the author of four published novels and a collection of short stories. Her debut novel Out of Time won the 1990 Lambda Literary Award for Fiction. She has published three nonfiction books on lesbian and gay culture and politics as well as numerous articles, essays, and short stories. Also a playwright, her works have had productions with Pittsburgh Playwrights Theater Company, Manhattan Theatre Source, the Pittsburgh New Works Festival, No Name Players, and others. She teaches creative writing at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.