When the author released her work in the 80s and 90s apparently it wasn’t very popular, this was because (especially in Haunted Houses) her novel follows mundane women, they aren’t especially powerful or groundbreaking, they are just young women in America discovering their place in their world, and people didn’t care about these kind of women at the time.

Lynne Tillman wrote about the lives of the average (though also white) girls, and she was relegated to the domain of non-recognition (in the UK, where she was published nearly a decade later, her work drew maybe one positive review, and soon went out of print). I found a great comfort in their absurdity’s, traumas and behaviours, the stories of average women are so valuable and I am so excited to read more from Lynne Tillman.

And it's like an album that everyone should have in their collection – one of those records they say "launched a thousand bands". Tillman charts the girls’ unsteady drift into womanhood, revealing the multiple forms of inheritance– family, gender, culture – that a girl must swallow or rebel against. When she published her first novel, Haunted Houses , in 1987 she had the same hopes and dreams as every debut novelist – that this novel would lead her to be “discovered”.

Haunted Houses is about the past within the present, the inescapability of private memory and public history.Payments made using National Book Tokens are processed by National Book Tokens Ltd, and you can read their Terms and Conditions here. I was writing something that I felt was important, about girls’ lives in a way that they hadn’t been represented. There's an omniscient narrator train of thought thing going on, somewhat rambling, but the prose is sharp. These cookies help provide information on metrics the number of visitors, bounce rate, traffic source, etc. Lynne Tillman’s writing is effortless, and she sails along at a steady clip with spare prose that is complex in its simplicity — fully loaded with gritty reality.