This abstract was compiled from materials provided by the publisher.
Carol Guess has composed, from glass-edged fragments of her life and her work as a creative artist, the mosaic of a woman who has fought to be her true self. Her adversaries have been many, and formidable. Those who dictated the ideal shape of her female body and the correct dimensions of her sexuality as she emerged from a childhood in the south, ensnared in sexual exploitations and a spiral of anorexia. The teachers who attempted to extinguish her ambitions and identity as a creative artist—because female writing could not possibly rise above the trivial. The politics of art and sexuality that continue to litter her path as a lesbian academic and a serious artist.
Gaslight speaks to the expressive individual you have struggled to become. To the questing child and adolescent you once were. Gaslight shares each step of the interior process of creation and of failing to create: the process of becoming a writer. She illuminates the path to art and to individuality.
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