Available in paperback and Kindle.
Synopsis:
Roxanne G. is trying to get her boyfriend — Dummy Boy — to tattoo her name on his penis. He doesn’t want to do that. So Roxanne uses her womanly wiles to train Dummy Boy to do what he doesn’t want to do — go to a bookstore and hot yoga, eat sushi and dim sum, attend a symphony and bookreading…until he finally agrees to get the tattoo. She dumps him after he gets it, leaving him distraught and suicidal. Read this misandristic story to find out if Dummy Boy survives to show his penis to another woman.
The original purpose of this satirical soft-core foodie porn novelette was to tell lewd jokes to make people laugh. That’s it. No themes intended, just vulgar fun with a foodie bent that involves fictional Yelp reviews from an imagined basic bitch perspective. Now that this book is done and I’ve read it a few times, themes emerge: the hypocrisy and cruelty of people; people as frauds; the lies we tell ourselves about ourselves; and the truths about ourselves we inadvertently reveal. What other themes have I missed?
I use the Yelp review format because I originally wrote most of this story on Yelp (and taken down by Yelp thrice). Since Yelp doesn’t allow for fictional characters writing semi-fictional reviews on its site (and, okay okay, some of the reviews are mind-blowingly offensive to some people), I’m publishing it as a book, e and paperback.
Why Yelp format? Why not? I’ve seen “Elite” Yelp reviewers use Yelp pretty much as a diary. “Last night my boyfriend and I went to Metro Grill and we had this and that and we liked this, didn’t like that…” So what’s the value of using this format? I don’t know. I’ll let better literary critics assess the literary merits of this format, I’m just a pornographer.
Who is Roxanne G.? She’s an experiment, she’s my alter ego. I created her to train myself to observe and feel from a different perspective. Roxanne G. should have a voice dissimilar to mine — the voice you’re reading now — and I apologize if I fall out of character often enough to make your experience jarring. Let me know what I can fix and I’ll see what I can do.
Roxanne G. isn’t based on any specific person. She’s just a Valley Girl, a basic Basic Bitch I imagined. My imagination probably is informed by personal experience, but I don’t want to get into that right now. I want the reader to focus on Roxanne G.’s story as her own story, to not get sidetracked by gender politics, at least not until after reading it. You decide how accurate the representations of, say, romantic relationships, BFF relationships between women, women and men in general…are in this book. Send what you think to foodyap@gmail.com. All sorts of comments welcome, including hate mail. You must greet me with “Dear Misogynist” in the subject line.
Like any weekly TV sitcom, each Yelp review can be read independently of the others. But you won’t be able to follow the story arc if you do that for the first read, and you won’t get a feel for the build-up of tension. Any way you read it, I hope you enjoy it!