I’ve been reading through some novels by Katherine V. Forrest.  I recently bought several of them super-cheap and I now own the entire Kate Delafield detective series.  So I’m reading them from the beginning.

These novels, the few from the series that were in my public library, were some of the first lesbian fiction I read, hidden among the piles of Agatha Christie and Joan Hess and all the picture books I read to my toddlers.

Now I’m reading the whole series from beginning to end, and I’m realizing something.  During the whole time Forrest was writing those novels, during the whole time she was recounting aspects of lesbian life, I was – on a different planet.  It’s really the only way to describe it.  I just finished one that was both written and set in 1985.  I was in my first year of college.  I went to bible college.  I loved it.  I loved the big city, and I was part of a Big Brothers/Big Sisters program and I had a little sister in the blighted Cabrini Green housing project.  It was an exciting young life.

But – at the same time, there was a whole world out there about which I knew nothing at all.  I didn’t even know the word lesbian.  I didn’t know then that what I thought of as my lack of faith was really my true self.   I didn’t know that I’d be, twenty years later, discovering that the thin shell I wore around myself that poked into me all the time – it was just made of lies.  I didn’t know myself fully.

So I appreciate the opportunity to, as it were, go back in time and know that while I was floating out there unaware, there were women who were publishing books I’d one day read so I could learn about myself.   Who knew?  Not I.

Over at Camlin’s Crooked Line, Anna/Camlin writes about similar issues.  Recently she had the opportunity to read her own writing about being a late bloomer herself, and offering encouragement to other women that it really will be OK – much better than OK – on the other side.  I asked her if I could share her reading, and she said yes, so here it is.  Beautiful writing, lovely reading, and a personal account that gives hope and sweetness and light to the process of finding oneself later in life.

And for reasons I can’t quite explain, this lovely song feels to me like the soundtrack to my personal experience of hearing Anna’s piece:

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