Majority of the text is thoughts that the main character has, rather than action, so if you don’t like that, this is not the book for you. The perfect read for fans of Raven Leilani and Ottessa Moshfegh, this is a book that will have people talking. L’incontro con Nathan sembra sospingerla indietro verso quello che appare come un terreno di normalizzazione, l’eterosessualità.

The book of Acts of Service is great fiction where at fifteen, Eve, fell in love with a girl in her own town in Massachusetts. I was like a spinster full of anxieties and repressions, charged with chaperoning a young girl who could not fathom the injustice of the arrangement. Eve, the narrator of Lillian Fishman's Acts of Service, keeps an Eve Babitz quote taped to her wall that she and her roommate reference constantly: 'Any time I want, I can forsake this dinner party and jump into real life'.

the author is queer, the lived experience of queerness is convincing, and drawing more contrasting material from that well might have steered the course away from that fucking clown show of a denouement, if only because it’d mean there were more things to react to in the world.

Fishman's provocative debut covers topics of sexuality, morality, agency and desire through the lens of a lesbian 20-something in New York City, and the heterosexual couple she enters into a dubious relationship. Another reviewer wrote "For a book about queerness and womanhood, the whole thing is obsessed with men. the legacy of art by and about gay women is about looking at each other and the destabilizing romantic/erotic force of seeing and being seen (portrait of a lady on fire voice: regardez) (that one very twitter famous piece of art voice: me looking at her looking at me). it’s about love and sex, gender and power, and how to find yourself or even know what that would look like.It is a bit ambiguous, which will only annoy people who already hate Nathan, but it is just how Eve would see it and that ambiguity I don't think detracts from what the book is trying to do. Her sex writing, in particular, is sexy and disturbing, just as it should be given the circumstances. Eve isn't a very likeable character and prone to rambling navel-gazing at great,and tedious, length while Nathan is a bit of a Poundland psychologist and Olivia flits around in the shadows like an afterthought. to all authors out there, stop the omission of speech marks in your work in favour for what you think is quirkiness.

Vivono entrambe a New York, così, si incontrano la sera dopo: ma Olivia non vuole fare sesso con Eve – o meglio, non vuole farlo subito, adesso: per il momento quello che vuole è farle conoscere il suo magnifico amante Nathan, molto chiaramente coinvolgerla in una storia a tre. the central emotional tension is about how eve is going to bridge that gap with olivia, and then… she doesn’t. Because I was decidedly superficial, and always had been—­nothing interested me more than the prettiness of a girl on the street—­a small but relentless part of my life entailed predicting the many ways I could f*** up our love. It angered me because it proposed the same old tired answer to the question of gender distinctions that men in evangelical circles have been throwing at me my whole life: I know what you really want; I’ll give it to you, soon as you stop pretending you could ever hope to know it for yourself.Part erotic Bildungsroman, part melancholy comedy of manners, it arrives with quiet confidence and a fully formed bank of ideas about intimacy, sexual ethics and contemporary mores that Fishman could go on exploring for years to come. women are more complicated” is the refrain of the bisexual coward with a straight boyfriend, but it’s also true in the sense that on a date with a man you can let the dominant hetero narrative of your choosing take the reins and forget yourself, along with the person seated across from you, in it - you can voluntarily strip away your own personhood and the personhood of the guy at the table and simply let the dominant social forces of gender and sexuality jaeger you around.