About this item
The Girls Club is the coming-of-age story of a young, white, working-class woman. Set in the 1970s, the story revolves around Cora Rose as she copes with her emerging sexuality, an illness her sisters refer to as "the dreaded bowel disease," and the conflicts created by the growing disparity between her desires and her Catholic upbringing.Part one deals with the three sisters' adolescent relationship to each other and their Catholic working-class world. Cora Rose's distress at being caught in an embrace with her best friend Stella leads her to sleep with the first boy who shows interest. She is married with a child at age eighteen.Part two shows how the sisters help and hinder each other in their struggles to take control and responsibility over their lives.Part three reveals Cora Rose's physical challenges, including an ostomy, that further complicate her feelings about her sexuality and increase her need for her sisters' support. She becomes involved with a woman she meets at a bar called The Girls Club. Marie and Renee play out their own struggles as Cora Rose leaves her husband, fights to keep her child, and overcomes religious and social prejudices that threaten her personal integrity.Sally Bellerose was awarded a Fellowship in Literature from the National Endowment for the Arts based on an excerpt from this book. The manuscript was a finalist for the James Jones Fellowship, the Thomas Wolfe Fiction Prize, and the Bellwether Endowment. Sally Bellerose lives in Northampton, Massachusetts..
About the Author
Sally Bellerose has held many jobs including, but not limited to, fence painter, babysitter, hall guard, tobacco picker, short order cook, hole-punch operator, cashier, bus driver, security guard, EMT, nurses' aid, Personal Care Attendant, editor, RN, author, and gardener.
Once, as a laundress, in the era when he used the name Cassius Clay, she washed many pairs of Muhammad Ali's exquisitely knit socks and handed them directly to him. With the possible exception of her son, he was the most beautiful man she has ever seen. She has held many other jobs that she has forgotten or chooses not to reveal.
Sexuality, illness, and class are common themes in her writing. In writing, she is interested in messy, confusing, complicated relationships. Whether writing about growing up in the 60's, lesbian love, nursing, or her elderly parents, Bellerose has found the basic themes haven't changed much. The older she gets, the more interested she becomes in the line between sentimentality and empathy in her work and the value of embracing humor, irony, and absurdity in her life and writing. She is also trying to wrestle with the messy, confusing, and complicated relationships of anger, love, and transcendence. She is fiercely working class and struggles with her passions and prejudices when exploring the ways class, race, good or bad luck, and ability interact and inform each other.
Her awards include a Fellowship from The National Endowment for the Arts, The Barbara Deming Prize, and The Rick DeMarinis Award. Her work appears in a call to nursing, Crab Orchard Review, The Sun, Hayden's Ferry Review, Cutthroat, Per Contra, Sniplits, and dozens of other anthologies and publications. Her short Story Fishwives won first place in the Saints and Sinners Writers Conference where she as a featured reader. Her novel, The Girls Club won the Bywater Prize and is available from Bywater Books.
Bellerose loves to give readings and can be reached at sbellerose@comcast.net or on facebook.
Please visit her at her blog http://sallybellerose.wordpress.com . She loves and responds to all comments.
