Sally Bellerose

Fishwives explores the passionate and troubled lifetime of an elderly lesbian couple.

IN HER LONG awaited second novel, Fishwives, award winning author Sally Bellerose introduces readers to a fascinating elderly lesbian couple with more stories to tell than time left to tell them. Eighty-nine-year-old Regina and ninety-year-old Jackie met in 1955, an era when women were rounded up and jailed simply for dancing together or dressing like a man. On a cold winter day, they manage to get themselves out of the house with the help of TJ and Ramon, two young men from their working-class neighborhood in Western Massachusetts. They tie their long-dead Christmas tree to the top of their car and, using a screwdriver in place of a broken gearshift, slowly make the drive to the dump. This is also the day when everything changes. During the course of their adventure, memories are triggered. Their history as a passionate and devoted, but troubled couple at the intersection of historic cultural and political change unfolds via scenes from the past, including their first meeting during a police raid on a bar and Regina’s epiphany that she could truly love another woman. In the early years, they often live apart as they flee landlords who discover their secret. As their journey leads them to seek jobs and a sustainable life, they are sometimes separated—but always find their way back to each other.

Combining the pathos and social significance of Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café and the humor of The Golden Girls with a cast of diverse characters worthy of the musical Rent, Fishwives chronicles a lifetime through the eyes of two old women behaving badly.

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“Class, sex, illness, and the absurdity of life have always fascinated me,” explains Bellerose. “Lately I have added growing old to the list. And this is a novel about old ladies behaving badly. And by badly I mean autonomously—a condition often discouraged and disparaged in old people. I like the idea of writing about long entwined lives because it gives me a chance to mess with the rhythm of time and shifting relationships.”

Sally Bellerose is also the award-winning author of The Girls Club, which was awarded a Creative Writing Fellowship from the NEA. The novel also won the Rick De Marinis Award, the Writers at Work Award, and a Barbara Deming Award, and was a finalist for the James Jones Fellowship, the Thomas Wolfe Fiction Prize, and The Backspace Scholarship. Two stories adapted from Fishwives have won First Prize for Fiction at the Tennessee Williams Saints and Sinners Festival and along with a third excerpt have been published in anthologies connected with the festival. Adapted stories were also published in Bloom and Dappled Things. Dorothy Allison selected the short story “Sunflowers,” adapted from Fishwives, for inclusion in Walking the Edge: A Southern Gothic Anthology.

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