Monica Nolan was born and raised in Chicago, Illinois. She was educated at St. Jerome’s parochial school, St. Ignatius College Prep, Bryn Mawr College, and San Francisco State University, where she received an MFA in Cinema. Monica has lived and worked in Alaska, New York, Chicago, and Ruthieres, France. She is the author of Lois Lenz, Lesbian Secretary and co-author with Alisa Surkis of The Big Book of Lesbian Horse Stories. She currently lives in San Francisco, California.

In this interview, I chatted to Monica about lesbian pulp fiction, horses and sapphic pop culture.

Alex Creece: Hey Monica! I became familiar with your work after nabbing a coveted copy of The Big Book of Lesbian Horse Stories at a secondhand bookshop. I was delighted!

Monica Nolan: And I am delighted that a copy was circulating somewhere on another continent!

AC: Yay! You co-wrote this book of lesbian pulp fiction with Alisa Surkis. Can you tell us how it came about? I reckon ‘lesbian pulp author’ has got to be one of the coolest job titles ever!

MN: It started as a joke, a game, an excuse to call in sick to my temp job and hang out with Alisa, who was visiting from New York.

It continued probably because of deep job dissatisfaction on both our parts; I think Alisa was in neurology grad school, and I was doing clerical temping in San Francisco, stage-managing at Theater Rhino, and looking for some sort of low-level arts job. Eventually, I went back to grad school to study film, and I remember using one of the stories on my application, so we must have finished at least a couple by that point? The whole collection took a long time to finish because we (mostly me) were often focused elsewhere.

Alisa’s partner, Colleen, was on a women’s basketball team and connected with a teammate who connected us with an agent. There may have been more links in the chain – I don’t remember now. It should also be said that Colleen was the only one in our circle who actually had experience with horses!

AC: When I found The Big Book, it felt familiarly and oddly specific to me as a lesbian ‘horse girl’. When I speaking to other sapphic people, I noticed that many also identified with the ‘horse person’ archetype, especially thinking back to being young and closeted.

Why do you think lesbians may feel a sense of kinship with horses?

MN: I have no clear, succinct explanation, but there’s definitely something mysterious and probably subconscious going on. My first reaction is that horse girls tend to fall under the umbrella of tomboys. Tomboys represent a rejection of expected female behavior, which is also connected to lesbianism.

Then I wonder if riding astride – as opposed to sidesaddle – has something to do with it, as this is historically linked to crossdressing, women’s rights, claiming male privilege, and so forth. But that might just be the detritus of some feminist theory from college.

However, gender politics aside, I think what lesbian girls get out of the horse obsession is less about rejecting expected female behavior – because, hey, this is an accepted stage of development anyway! – and maybe, I don’t know, more connected to a desire to escape the human race (and its issues) altogether.

In typical horse girl stories, the protagonist shares a bond with her horse that transcends the owner/pet relationship and is more like the kind of passionate friendship described in Victorian lesbian narratives. So maybe it’s the refusal of the human (let alone hetero!) relationships that speaks to lonely, alienated lesbians.

I’ll stop speculating now. And let me say: my contact with horses was limited to one 40-minute trail ride each summer while vacationing in Wisconsin between the ages of eight and 15!

AC: You’ve also written a series of pulp novels about lesbian ‘career girls’. What drew you to setting these stories in workplaces?

MN: In my youth, I read a book by Studs Terkel called Working. It’s an oral history, the result of Terkel’s interviews with all sorts of different people from all different professions across America. Studsy, if you don’t know him, was a kind of lefty radio guy in Chicago in the ’60s and ’70s, and Working is great labor history.

One of the people he interviewed was the film critic Pauline Kael, who – instead of talking about her job as a critic – riffed on the lack of depictions of work in the movies. I was really struck by that, and it stayed with me.

Whenever I read a novel or watch a movie, I always want to know: how is this person paying the rent? What’s their day job? How come they have so much free time to do whatever the book/movie is about? It gets on my nerves that Patti Smith hides her day job in her memoir Kids. She didn’t spend all her time in the Chelsea Hotel lobby watching people go by. She worked in a bookstore, fairly steadily.

Career girls also represent a rejection of expected female behavior – again, linking back to lesbianism. You see this in a lot of lesbian pulps. That said, Beebo Brinker in Ann Bannon’s eponymous novel gets a job delivering pizzas and spends very little time on the job. She’s always calling in sick to carry on her numerous affairs, or because she’s hungover or whatever. Her only real career is to be butch.

Finally, there’s a series of books that were put out from the late ’40s to the early ’70s by a publishing company called Julian Messner. The series was called Romances for Young Moderns, and each book featured a girl who’s trying to combine career and romance.

I adore these books – they’re such great little socialisation pills, full of mixed messages. Yes, have a career! But have a husband and cook and clean for him, too!

Usually, the conflict between the heroine who wants both a career and a family is resolved by having say, a doctor marry a nurse, or – in a more unusual example – a female architect falls in love with a builder. Or a professional home economist (where has that career gone?!) who loves baking falls for a guy who owns a flour mill. And, of course, these books never follow the characters beyond the marriage proposal, or deal with the reality of childcare.

It’s interesting to observe that the more traditionally ‘masculine’ the career the protagonist undertakes (such as doctor or lawyer), the more mixed the book’s message is, and the more setbacks and humiliation the protagonist receives. On the other hand, characters in female-dominated professions, like a nurse and teacher, are often more militant, defending their ambitions and career goals in ways that sound almost feminist.

AC: Your work blends the pulp genre with ’50s teen novels. How did you hone this writing style?

MN: I’ve read a lot of books in both genres. A lot. And then reread them. I also read period magazines, early lesbian publications like The Ladder, and cultural histories of the era. And I watched movies from the ’40s and ’50s. The style of that era becomes easy to pull up after years of soaking in it.

I’m drawn to that period. I’ve always been fascinated by mid-century America, which feels so close and yet so far from my own experience.

My mother left home to work in New York and share an apartment with friends in the late ’50s, and that was a huge deal. And those expectations persisted into my own childhood – in early family photos, there are my sisters and me, in black and white, dressed up for church wearing hats and gloves. Then two years later, the pictures are in colour and I’m wearing overalls with big orange flowers. So, I experienced that cultural shift without really being aware of it as a shift.

I’m still interested in exploring that moment that preceded the counterculture. And particularly the way it wasn’t monolithic, but more like a swiss cheese, pocked with all sorts of incipient rebellions.

AC: Jaye Zimet’s Strange Sisters: The Art of Lesbian Pulp Fiction 1949–1969 catalogues the characteristic cover art of lesbian pulp novels, which often reinforced particular imagery or cliches (such as stereotypical depictions of butches and femmes). How did you approach the cover design and aesthetic of your books?

MN: My book covers are very much the work of my publisher, Kensington. I think I suggested the basic scene, maybe sketched out the woman at the desk and woman perched on the desk for the first, but they did the rest.

I love them. John Scognamiglio, my editor, got the pulp vibe, wanted it, and went for it. I think the artist was trying to be over-the-top, which is really hard when you’re drawing inspiration from lesbian pulp cover art from the period. Hence those enormous, cantilevered breasts sticking out from every single character. Kind of appalling, and kind of great.

AC: Zimet’s book also explores the trends in lesbian pulp over time, and shows how the genre is an artefact of sapphic history. Ann Bannon, a key pulp literary figure, was commended by Joan Nestle (from the Lesbian Herstory Archive) for her body of work as a form of ‘lesbian survival literature’.

MN: The crucial thing about Ann Bannon’s work is that she subverted the convention of the lesbian romance ending unhappily by creating a series around a group of characters. So, at the end of Odd Girl Out [Bannon’s first book], Laura and Beth end their secret college romance – Laura leaves school and is headed off to the shadows, while Beth is “rescued” by a heterosexual romance. A classic ’50s pulp ending.

But then Bannon revisits Beth and Laura in Journey to a Woman, and Beth is now an unhappy housewife who abandons her husband and kids to go looking for her long-lost lesbian love, who is now in a companionate marriage to a gay man! It’s a brilliant book.

AC: What are some of your favourite lesbian pulp novels?

MN: Journey to a Woman, my first encounter with lesbian pulp, is probably my favourite. I’m also a huge fan of Valerie Taylor, who wrote Girls in 3B, and another version of the unhappy housewife who can’t stand heterosexuality a minute longer and leaves her husband for a woman, Return to Lesbos.

Then there’s Paula Christian’s Amanda, in which a supposedly straight writer of lesbian pulp goes queer in a very meta take on the genre.

I’m also fond of Marijane Meaker, who wrote in a variety of genres under a whole slew of pseudonyms, starting with Spring Fire (writing as Vin Packer), one of the first lesbian pulps, and continuing with a series of pseudo-sociological studies of lesbian life under the name Ann Aldrich.

She later wrote young adult realist fiction in the ’70s, and started including queer characters in these books in the ’80s, at the beginning of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. A completely fascinating woman who needs to have her biography written. And so many more.

AC: What impact has pulp fiction had on your own identity (if any)?

MN: Well, when I was young, I pretty much rejected the image of lesbians the books presented. Uh uh, not me. While at the same time, I was reading and reading. Because they seemed to have something to say about lesbian culture.

So, I was drawn and repelled, simultaneously.

I would say that’s my reaction to most lesbian themed literature that I’ve read – all that earnest fiction in the ’80s and ’90s! And I still have the same reaction, maybe it’s become habit.

I recently read Dykette. Fun stuff, but who are these people? It seemed to be more about influencer culture than any lesbians I’ve encountered. I probably don’t get out enough, and now I’m older and there’s the digital generation gap.

I had the same reaction to – what was that show called? – The L Word as I did to lesbian pulp books, which makes sense because that was pure pulp. Again, I was drawn and repelled. I would start watching, and then almost instantly I would be complaining, ranting at the screen. People eventually refused to watch it with me!

I’m saved from complete lesbian cultural alienation by the movies of Madeleine Olnek (The Foxy Merkins is BRILLIANT!), and I can always read Eileen Myles. I have a feeling there’s more out there, but good lesbian stuff is still hard to find.

Image by: Julie Ann Yuen.

AC: If you wrote a lesbian pulp book about yourself, what would it be about? What would its title be?

MN: Ha! I kind of already did, when I wrote the third book in the series, Maxie Mainwaring, Lesbian Dilettante, a book about the never-ending search for the perfect job. Complete with a wish-fulfillment ending wherein the heroine figures out a way to support herself while only doing what interests her, rejecting permanency and stability and the dreaded day job! Wish that it were true…