What readers are saying about Patient Women!

What readers are saying about Patient Women:

Dive into the deep end: read this novel! Unforgettable and mesmerizing!

There are many categories of writing, but as readers there are two distinct places we tend to go: either `escape from reality' mode or `dive into the deep end' through writing that unnerves us on a personal level. The poems/stories or novels may be situated in different continents, cultures, even species, and yet they confront us with fragments of ourselves that defy diversity.
Shmailo's work takes me to places in my life that I am both afraid and compelled by. There is no escape here. It is about recognition and a fortitude that didn't exist before. It is about finding oneself again, in amazement and thankfulness, through another writer's words.
Here are some quotes from Shmailo's novel, Patient Women.
"There was anger in the house, anger in the very walls."
"Home life acquired a dangerous sameness."
"Nora had learned to detect the subtlest shifts in the affective atmosphere of her home: she became expert in detecting and defusing the charges, like a teenage bomb squad."
"Nora kept rattling him like a jammed door she was sure she had the right to enter."
"God writes straight with crooked lines, Nora..."
Shmailo takes the reader into the world of a strong, sensitive, acute protagonist, Nora, who moves through many lives in this novel. She is a sex worker, a brilliant woman, an incest survivor, a woman who takes us into the streets and wrestles with her/our inner/outer demons. Patient Women is a novel everyone should read. There is no shrinking back from the violence Nora experiences and witnesses and the power of Shmailo's brilliant writing that takes us inside all of it.
Don't miss out on this! Get a copy and find yourself mesmerized and changed by Patient Women. WOW!!! Unforgettable!

—Meg  Tuite

If you are in any type of recovery program, you will recognize the characters in this book as people you know. I read the erudite blurbs on the back, which would scare away most of the people I know [who] would find it a fascinating and compelling read. It may be a 'literary novel', but it reads like real life, reads like the lives of the people I know. Recovery friends, we are in this book! Great job award goes to the author!

—Yoby Henthorn

Christ-figures are likely to be cross-dressers in this engaging bildungsroman, which takes us on a wild ride through NYC nightclubs of the 1970's, rock-bottom blackouts, a whorehouse, and the slogan-filled rooms of recovery. Surreal and lyrical, then bawdy and riotous, then plainspoken and tragic, Patient Women had me rooting hard for its lovable, drowning heroine to keep her head above water and let in grace. —Anne Elliott, author of The Beginning of the End of the Beginning

Nora, born to a holocaust survivor mother, finds herself, at the threshold of adolescence in “boring Queens.” Lying about her age, her first transgression from her mother’s iron rule, she begins a series of ill-fated attempts to put distance between herself and the familial web she so desperately wants to disentangle from. She reels from one dysfunctional relationship to another, druggies, pimps, losers, and masochists, searching for her lovable self. This novel unfolds in a whirlwind that is sometimes her present. Be ready to have your heart broken and then made whole. —Bonny Finberg

Larissa Shmailo’s newest work, Patient Women, is an unflinching exploration of the lasting damage some people can inflict on their children. Nora, Shmailo’s protagonist, evolves as she struggles to understand and heal her own self-hatred and her on-going self-destructive choices. Slogging one's way through a morass of denial and repression is a strong trope throughout this raw, honest book. Nora is fiercely vulnerable and the sympathetic hero of her own salvation. This novel is dark, but there is hope that even the pain one lives through can cause one to create, finally, lasting and beautiful art.

—Joani Reese

Patient Women on Amazon

• More about Patient Women

Interview

My autobiography will read: I am hired. But no: I am still here, in this little office, where
the fluorescent light surrounds me like cloacal fluid. The personnel manager’s eyes are dark
and dilated, without visible irises, whether from the peculiar quanta of the overhead light or
the cocaine of my need, I don’t know.
She is self-satisfied and content now, self-consciously busy, and she preens herself with
papers on her desk. She is almost ready to talk to me. I wait like a dog who has not been
walked for a long time.
Finally, she turns her attention to me. Why do you want this job? she asks.
I'm desperate, I reply. My unemployment checks ran out two weeks ago and I have no
money. I've been on unemployment a lot these last few years and I have no reserves; in all
senses of the word, I have no reserves left. You see, I have a manic-depressive illness, a
very severe one, not just a few moodswings here or there, or a common cold-type
depression, but grand mal mania with delusions, and I've lost a lot of jobs. I don't get
fired per se — they just eliminate my position and this way, they don’t get sued. But I did
sue one place, not for firing me because I was a manic-depressive, but because I was a
manic-depressive. Is there a difference? I don’t know.
I got unemployment that time, and then again when I danced over where the AIDS
orphans were buried. I was coming late because I had to dervish over their corpses, the
corpses of the unburied dead. I was dancing to mark the spot. Perhaps, I thought,
perhaps, they would see and understand, but they fired me. I was coming late a lot. They
eliminated my position — they were glad to give me unemployment. Really, they would
have done a lot more just to be rid of me, I was a disturbance after all.
I take medication now. It makes me slow, but I can still do this work. Not with any
enthusiasm — I am no longer sharp. I'm burnt out, as you can imagine, from so many
illnesses. Sometimes my thinking is fuzzy, and I simply don’t have the fire any more. I
used to be quite good, quite an overachiever. I worked long hours and slaved to make
everything perfect. Now, I just rewrite the old. It’s all old.
With supervision, I know I will be okay. I'm hoping for a boss who is indecisive and a
little lazy, and if we can pass letters back and forth for endless time-consuming corrections,
it wouldn’t bother me at all. That would be just fine. Bureaucracy and indecision used to
bother me; I worried about my brilliant career and how the slowness and incompetence and
stupidity of my boss would hold me back, but then I became a poet and didn’t give a shit
anymore. I once cared passionately about poetry, too, but now I don’t worry about that
much, either. I just want a paycheck and a place to go during the day so I don’t crawl into
bed and piss on the sheets. The only thing I have to keep me occupied right now is walking
my dog and interviews like these.
You know, a job like this one wasn’t good enough for me once, but now this really is the
best I can do. I would be delighted if I got this job. If I could do it. If I could show up. If
I don’t just crawl back into bed. But, you see, the alimony runs out soon. It's a shitty agreement but I was nuts, and signed, you see. Because then, I was confident. I was always so confident, confident in my ability to take care of myself, to come back from any disaster. That's gone now, you understand, completely, utterly gone ... I used to think I could change the world; now, I don’t think I can change my sheets.
But I'm pretty sure I can still do this job, as long as I don't have to create anything. If I can
copy a template, I know I’ll do fine. I was once creative; I was a bright, no, brilliant kid,
but I drank a lot, spent a lot of time on psych wards, and it started to catch up with me.
There’s only so many times you can get really manic before the permanent damage sets in.
Anyway, my psychiatrist says I need some structure, and I agree, and a job would really
help.
Does that answer your question? You know, your pupils are so dilated. It’s an interview, a
two-way street. Have you seen into me? I can't see into you. Maybe you're a manic depressive,
too. Maybe you rush out from here every day to the office of a waiting shrink
to weep and scream your despair, to say, I can't go on, it hurts too much ....
I see your irises now, blue like mine, and know you have lived without sickness and without
despair, and your normal life of normal frustrations and no huge events looks at me without
a trace of pity. This interview and our interaction is the worst thing that will happen to you
this month. I know you've had your troubles, too. It’s just that I have to come back from a
place that doesn't even exist to sit here today, and I'm so tired I could just die.
If this were the thirties, you would give me a break. Back then, no one pretended that
things were just fine. People liked homeless people, called them hobos, gave them jobs. I
gave my diamond engagement ring to a homeless man last year, I gave all my clothes away
to the poor, because I was confident back then. Do you know what I would do for one
ounce of confidence today?
I stopped, and the fluorescence ate my words. The papers on her desk absorbed the
sounds, and around me like sewage my cheerful interview self returned, and I answered the
other questions as anybody would, and she pretended that she hadn’t heard a word of what
I had said.

Vacana in the voice of Mahadevi-akka

A vacana in the voice of Mahadevi-akka, homeless wanderer, poet, patroness of women, and bride of Siva. Om namah shivayah!

Nataraja, white as jasmine, fill me.
Lord, hair matted from love, still me.
Indra Deva of the meeting rivers, kill me.
Let eight hundred forty thousand deaths now take me,
As you, Bhadra-Bhima, won't forsake me.
Laugh, brother Blue Throat, for the poison we will drink.
Brother-lover-husband-son, I'll sing and will not think.
Shakra, Lord Asura, take the burden of my tears.
Now, Indra Deva, take the tribute of my years.

MADISON SQUARE PARK, 5:29 A.M.

Dawn: I wake in the park, face puffy and red;

Liquid, brown tallboys, broken glass, at my head.

The bench is cool, my shoes are gone, my fishnet stockings torn;

I wish I were elsewhere, lived differently, was safe, or never born.  

Policemen tell me, broke and blackly bruised, to move along;

I find cardboard in the garbage, make a sign, sing a song.

A teenager stops, sings with me, and blushing. averts his eyes;

Women pass, scorn me, prouder than they might be otherwise.

A businessman winks, gives nothing; a serviceman gives a buck.

Men hang out windows; one screams obscenities from his truck.

What some men will hit on, eagerly, still astonishes me;

You are never too sick, too dirty, or too old, apparently.

List of Words Never To Be Used in Poems

 … Soul, being, essence, fire, dream, auburn, scent, inhumanity, starry, ripe, free, heaven, transcend, memory, butterfly, chrysalis, please, mad, ecology, teach, tear, lachrymose, cry, frown, smile, love, thought, potential, season, poetry, verse. Transubstantiate, transform, ascend, breathe, breath, usurp, sing, shudder, genius, antihero, thrush, lark birdsong, exaltation, maid, woman, man, men, attempt, right, am, word, tresses, thrill, form. Character, said, desire, longing, elm, oak, tree, flame, yearn, burn, consume, new, human, bow, warrior, want, page, blank. And so far, you agree. Well, then…

Understanding, unique, déluge, dacha, manqué, mensch, wheelbarrow, manifest, palimpsest, avatar, sight, seer, samovar, light, ingredient, save, Oprah, Jerry, nothing, but, yet. The, a, loneliness, mélange, sea, lighthouse, tower, healing, light, use, underscore, trial, Kafka, yes, shop, radiant, garden, fore, yore, music, recollection, last, addiction, evolution. First, over, in, DNA, Darwinian, medicate, pharmacology, software, star, hardwired, stellar, bang, relate. Relationship, query, queer, think, survivor, mine, pain, sorrow, tragedy, woe, enter, laughing, mope, still. Still with me? How about…?

Life, live, living, hope, horror, help, one, singularity, Buddha, art, bomb, arms, lines, marital, Broadway, show, tell, ask, mission, missive, missile, realm, wonder, wander, know, knowledge, reify, epistemological, portent, magic, magical, many, omnipotent, avuncular, very, theme, adjective, parse, nun, father, mother, brother, we, our, us, I. Eye,  omnibus, rarity, time, past, future, date, number, year, one, abstract, narrative, native,  experiment, fusion, phrase, quote, café. Random (or mad), insight, learned, spirit, well, fine, good, thanks, fine, good. You?