pg 69 my girlfriend comes to city and

Pg. 69: "My Girlfriend Comes To The City And Beats Me Up"

Stephen Elliott is the author of the novels Happy Baby, What It Means

To Love You, A Life Without Consequences, and Jones Inn. He is also

the author of the political memoir Looking Forward To It Or How I

Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The American Political Process and

the editor of the anthologies Politically Inspired and Stumbling and

Raging: More Politically Inspired Fiction.

His latest book is the story collection My Girlfriend Comes To The

City And Beats Me Up.

I asked Stephen to put the book to the "page 69 test." Here is what he

reported:

Page 69 in My Girlfriend Comes To The City And Beats Me Up is

definitely a good page to read in my book. It starts with a

flashback. When I was fourteen (this is true) my father caught me

sleeping on the streets and dragged me home and handcuffed me to a

pipe in the basement of his house. So page 69 starts with that

memory. Then, it comes back into a scene where the main character

(me) is being tied to a bed by a woman he's just met. She's asking

him if he likes it, trying to get him to communicate, but he's

(I'm) not a good communicator. He says, "Do whatever you want to

me. I don't want to know." And she responds, "But you have to tell

me. You don't even know me. I need to know what you're into. What

are your limits?" And that's how the page ends.

Many thanks to Stephen for the input.

The story "My Girlfriend Comes To The City And Beats Me Up" is

available here. (I'm not sure if it's the entire, or final, version.)

Among the praise for My Girlfriend Comes To The City And Beats Me Up:

"Stephen Elliott knocks my fishnet stockings off."

--Audrey Niffenegger, author of The Time Traveler's Wife

"Any true love story, if told with the urgency and animal

intelligence of love, isn't for the fainthearted. On every page of

this profound, distilled work of art, Stephen Elliott wrestles with

the unknown and unspoken essences of love, and articulates that

unknown so beautifully, with such clear-eyed fearlessness...

Imagine a glass of pure water with one drop of blood hanging in its

center, about to dissolve... Then drink it and be transformed."

--Nick Flynn, author of Another Bullshit Night in Suck City

For a good review essay of the book, see "The Softer Side of S/M," by

Donna Minkowitz at Salon.

Visit Stephen's official website for more information, including links

to his MySpace page, his Chicago Tribune profile, and various

interviews.

There is a slightly dated biography of Stephen, which includes some

interview links, at McSweeney's Internet Tendency.

Of Happy Baby, Curtis Sittenfeld wrote: "I actually reviewed this book

for The New York Times Book Review, and before I started reading, I

didn't think I'd be crazy about it--it's about a boy who becomes a

ward of the state of Illinois, and it has some dark drug and sex

stuff. But I absolutely loved it. It's told very matter-of-factly and

is really poignant."

Stephen is the founder of the Progressive Reading Series which helps

authors raise money and participate on behalf of progressive

candidates across the country. He was a 2001 Stegner Fellow.

Previous "page 69 tests":

Colin McGinn, The Power of Movies

Sean Chercover, Big City, Bad Blood

Sigrid Nunez, The Last of Her Kind

Stanley Fish, How Milton Works

James Longenbach, The Resistance to Poetry

Margaret Lowrie Robertson, Season of Betrayal

Sy Montgomery, The Good Good Pig

Allison Burnett, The House Beautiful

Stephanie Coontz, Marriage, A History

Ed Lynskey, The Dirt-Brown Derby

Cindy Dyson, And She Was

Simon Blackburn, Truth

Brian Freeman, Stripped

Alyson M. Cole, The Cult of True Victimhood

Jeff Biggers, In the Sierra Madre

Jeff Broadwater, George Mason, Forgotten Founder

Alicia Steimberg, Andrea Labinger (trans.), The Rainforest

Michael Grunwald, The Swamp

Darrin McMahon, Happiness: A History

Leo Braudy, From Chivalry to Terrorism

David Nasaw, Andrew Carnegie

Leah Hager Cohen, Train Go Sorry

Chris Grabenstein, Slay Ride

David Helvarg, Blue Frontier

Marina Warner, Phantasmagoria

Bill Crider, A Mammoth Murder

Robert W. Bennett, Taming the Electoral College

Nicholas Stern et al, Stern Review Report

Kerry Emanuel, Divine Wind

Adam Langer, The Washington Story

Michael Scott Moore, Too Much of Nothing

Frank Schaeffer, Baby Jack

Wyn Cooper, Postcards from the Interior

Ivan Goncharov, Oblomov

Maureen Ogle, Ambitious Brew

Cass Sunstein, Infotopia

Paul W. Kahn, Out of Eden

Paul Lewis, Cracking Up

Pagan Kennedy, Confessions of a Memory Eater

David Greenberg, Nixon's Shadow

Duane Swierczynski, The Wheelman

George Levine, Darwin Loves You

John Barlow, Intoxicated

Alicia Steimberg, The Rainforest

Alan Wolfe, Does American Democracy Still Work?

John Dickerson, On Her Trail

Marcus Sakey, The Blade Itself

Randy Boyagoda, Governor of the Northern Province

John Gittings, The Changing Face of China

Rachel Kadish, Tolstoy Lied

Eric Rauchway, Blessed Among Nations

Tim Brookes, Guitar and other books

Ruth Padel, Tigers in Red Weather

William Haywood Henderson, Augusta Locke

Jed Horne, Breach of Faith

Robert Greer, The Fourth Perspective

David Plotz, The Genius Factory

Michael Allen Dymmoch, White Tiger

Patrick Thaddeus Jackson, Civilizing the Enemy

Tom Lutz, Doing Nothing

Libby Fischer Hellmann, A Shot To Die For

Nelson Algren, The Man With the Golden Arm

Bob Harris, Prisoner of Trebekistan

Elaine Flinn, Deadly Collection

Louise Welsh, The Bullet Trick

Gregg Hurwitz, Last Shot

Martha Powers, Death Angel

N.M. Kelby, Whale Season

Mario Acevedo, The Nymphos of Rocky Flats

Dominic Smith, The Mercury Visions of Louis Daguerre

Simon Blackburn, Lust

Linda L. Richards, Calculated Loss

Kevin Guilfoile, Cast of Shadows

Ronlyn Domingue, The Mercy of Thin Air

Shari Caudron, Who Are You People?

Marisha Pessl, Special Topics in Calamity Physics

John Sutherland, How to Read a Novel