Green Girl by Kate ZambrenoHarper Perennial, 2014 (Originally Emergency Press, 2011)

I wonder how I would have felt about Green Girl if it had been around for me to read when I was in college, when I was in my late teens or early twenties. I wonder how much Ruth, the main character, would have felt relatable: “I am a mess, mess, mess she thinks,” on page 13, and then on the same page there’s this: “She is such a trainwreck. But that’s why we like to watch. The spectacle of the unstable girl-woman. Look at her losing it in public.” Ruth is an American in London, working as a temp in the fragrance department at Harrods (which she calls Horrids) and generally being adrift. She lives in a bedsit at first, then moves to a flat with her Australian friend Agnes. She has work angst and relationship/sex angst and friendship angst. She sleeps until three pm on her day off; she goes to Liberty and lusts after clothes she can’t afford. She’s described like this:

She is not political. She is not political yet. She is halting, she is silent, she is unsure. She has not formed any opinions that are her own. Sometimes she hears someone else’s opinion, someone more forceful than herself (which is almost anyone) and she says that’s good for me too. So malleable she changes identity easily. How else does one figure out who one is? She has flashes of who she could be someday. (93)

In an interview at the back of this edition of the book, Zambreno says she sees Ruth as “a mystic character” who “isn’t looking for embodiment or empowerment but rather something closer to its opposite”; various female saints make appearances in the book, as do a group of London Hare Krishnas. At one point the narrative says, “The question is—does she awake? And what does she awaken to?” (95). The question isn’t answered, not quite, but I read the book’s final scene as more hopeful than not.


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