Word: venusized
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...latest book, Venus Envy, is a rather light-hearted tale about a beautiful, rich, successful woman named Mary Frazier Armstrong who is dying of cancer. She writes affecting farewell letters to her friends and family in her last moments, confessing her dreadful secret: she is gay. And then wakes up the morning after to the knowledge that she only has bronchitis, and will live for many more years...
Brown denies that Venus Envy is autobiographical. "People always think that...But Frazier and I are so different. The character--everything has to come out of the character." At her reading, she described herself as a "thief of souls," crawling into the skins of lots of very different people. Nevertheless, Frazier has enormous similarities to the woman...
Frazier refuses to define herself as a lesbian. This is one of the most refreshing things about Rita Mae Brown: she does not construct a rigid gay identity for her characters. The dividing line between gay and straight remains very fluid. For example, the goddess Venus--who materializes near the novel's end--believes that the division of people into the two categories is "a silly concept, but then you know people think in polarities these days. That's very destructive." Similarly, during her reading, Brown remarked: "I am never immune to the charms of the opposite sex...I just...
...Brown resents an attempt to pin her down. "I know you don't like being called a lesbian author," I said tentatively. (On the back flap of Venus Envy, she remarks that if anyone tries to define her as such again, she will "knock their teeth in.") "If you're going to label me, then you have to label everyone," Brown replied reasonably. "Then Norman Mailer has to be a Jewish heterosexual writer. See what I mean...
Researchers admit their evidence is at best suggestive. However, they calculate that the ocean could have lasted hundreds of millions of years before boiling away in Venus' runaway greenhouse effect, certainly enough time for life to have come -- and gone...