Product Description

Rachel Spark is an irreverent, sexually eager, financially unstable thirty-year-old college instructor who moves back home when her mother is diagnosed with terminal breast cancer. As she tries to ease her mother, a perpetually cheerful woman, toward the inevitable, Rachel turns from one man to the next -- sometimes comically, sometimes catastrophically -- as if her own survival depended upon it.

Ella Bloom, an adult student in Rachel's poetry class, has aspirations beyond her work at a local family planning clinic. But she spends her nights wondering why her husband kissed one of her colleagues and whether it will lead to a full-fledged affair. She is also preoccupied with one of her repeat patients, Georgia, a teenager whose frequent clinic visits speak volumes. What they all have in common is their desire for love, despite its many obstacles.

A Girl Becomes a Comma Like That is a novel rife with wit and compassion. A provocative, assured new voice in literary fiction, Lisa Glatt eyes the yardsticks by which we constantly measure our world and ourselves -- devotion, lust, forgiveness, and courage.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #515635 in Books
• Published on: 2005-05-31
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 304 pages

Amazon.com
At the center of A Girl Becomes a Comma Like That, Lisa Glatt's heroic, hauntingly honest debut, is Rachel Sparks, a thirtysomething college professor who moves back home to sit with her mother while the older woman succumbs to terminal cancer. Glatt frames Rachel's story against a backdrop of women who range in age from 16 to 60, all of whom struggle with the conflicting sense of power versus the chilling vulnerability that seems so essential to their roles as women.

Although Rachel's mother's fate is apparent from the first chapter, Glatt does a commendable job of keeping the reader interested in her characters throughout the entire novel. We follow Rachel as she jumps from man to man, focusing on minute details while ignoring the basic flaws that make these men so fundamentally wrong for her. Along the way we get to know Rachel's student Ella Bloom, who must confront her cheating husband after less than a year of marriage. Ella's days are spent at a women's health clinic treating patients like 16-year-old Georgia Carter, who repeatedly exposes herself to sexually transmitted diseases in the hopes that one of these boys will show her the real affection that she can't get at home. ("Other men and boys noticed Georgia. It was as if they saw straight up inside her, all that she had done ... She understood that her body belonged to the whole damn street.")

While Glatt does an admirable job of showing women's weaknesses--and strengths--when dealing with men, it is her remarkable understanding of the tumultuous relationship that women have with their own bodies that makes this novel unique. From mastectomies to reconstructive surgeries to abortions to virtually anonymous sex, Glatt skillfully demonstrates how complex a woman's relationship with both her body and mind can be, and the tremendous power one often has over another. --Gisele Toueg

From Publishers Weekly
"A girl becomes a comma like that, with wrong boy after wrong boy," muses the narrator of Glatt's keenly observed debut. "She becomes a pause, something quick before the real thing." Rachel Spark, a 30-ish university poetry teacher, is looking for the real thing-but she's also living in L.A with her mother, "because she was sick and because I was poor.... It was love, yes, but need was part of it too." As her mother slowly succumbs to breast cancer, Rachel seeks solace-and escape-in the arms of various unsuitable men. Glatt's tone shifts through comic, pensive and mournful as she also explores the lives of Rachel's newlywed student, Ella Bloom; her lovelorn, allergy-challenged best friend, Angela Burrows; and Georgia Carter, a promiscuous 16-year-old patient at the health clinic where Ella works and where Rachel later seeks an abortion. Repeated references to breasts, limbs and organs in discomfort and disease foreground these women's uneasy relationships with their bodies and their lives; drunken and sorrowful sex abounds; connections with men are made and then broken. Rachel loves her mother, but disapproves of her shedding her wig, ordering a vibrator and falling in love in the face of death. As the dying woman-Glatt's liveliest character-evicts Rachel from her hospital room, readers may sympathize: much earlier, mother has diagnosed daughter, "You're thirty. Of course you need connection." Glatt's clear-eyed rendering of the complexities of relationships between friends and family enriches a story in which the steps toward healing are small and tentative, but moving nevertheless.
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Vanity Fair
"Glatt's A Girl Becomes a Comma Like That adds an emphatic exclamation point to the start of a promising career."

Customer Reviews

A PAUSE BEFORE THE REAL THING
"A girl becomes a comma like that, with wrong boy after wrong boy; she becomes a pause, something quick before the real thing." ---A Girl Becomes a Comma Like That

This is a book about thirst, hunger, emptiness, and unquenchable needs, which cannot be filled or absorbed. Rachel admits she is sleeping with Dirk, Dick, Derrick, whoever, whatever. Did it really matter? Just some guy she met in the bar. She is only a pause after all.

Rachel's mother is dying of cancer, so not being able to control this, Rachel flaunts from man to man, boy to boy, abortion to abortion. Will sex fill the void or nameless faces or one night stands?

This is a book about women's relationships, especially relationships between mother and daughter. Rachel at one point says, "Who will I call? What will I do? Whose arms will wrap around me?" Nobody can replace a mother. Nobody.

Glatt does not hold back, which the reader will appreciate. All of the sex, raw emotion, and heartache are directly on the pages. And one comes to the realization that it's not about the sex whatsoever, but about the love...the love...the love.

Thus, it is only a pause before the real thing, a suspension before true love, a substitute of what shall be. Sometimes pain can be forgotten by pleasure, and this is the way the women of "A Girl Becomes a Comma Like That" find survival.

***Beautiful writing and interesting insight

"Comma" is excellent...exclamation point!
This book is about women's relationships with men and with themselves. The central character of the story is Rachel Spark, a 30-year-old college professor who lives in a beachfront apartment with her terminally ill mother. Rachel drifts from man to man, and each one seems to be worse than the last.

We also learn about other women in Rachel's circle whose lives are all connected in some way. Angela Burrows, one of Rachel's best friends, is a physical and emotional basket case. Dust mites in her bedroom cause her lips to swell up to 10 times their normal size, and none of the men she invites into her giant bed seem to go with the decor. Ella Bloom is a young woman in Rachel's poetry class who works at a women's health clinic. In addition to dealing with troubled patients, Ella must come to terms with her husband Jack's wandering eye and her coworker Sarah's wandering hand, which wanders all the way down Jack's pants. Georgia Carter is a young girl who frequents Ella's clinic, contracting numerous STDs and unwanted pregnancies before she's even old enough to drive.

I really enjoyed this novel. The author skillfully jumps from one character's point of view to the next, keeping things exciting for the reader. There's a lot of frank talk about sex, disease, relationships, and pain, but each of these messed-up characters is remarkably strong in their own way. I thought it would have been nice to include a chapter told from Rachel's mother's point of view at the end of the book, but oh well...not a big deal.

"A Girl Becomes a Comma Like That" is innovative, moving, and very much in your face from the very beginning. I can't believe this is only the author's first novel...I look forward to reading more of her work.

A Girl Becomes a Mediocore Book...
I have to admit I was disappointed with this book. I was drawn in by what the story had to offer but it just didn't come through in the end. There were so many possibilities with the female characters in this book -- unfortunately, they each were developed enough to be intriguing but then the development, and storylines, stopped. Not a bad read, but not a memorable one either.