Barbara The Slut - Lauren Holmes

'When SLUT got spray-painted in pink letters down the front of my locker at the end of junior year, I had to go to the school therapist to talk about my feelings. I kind of liked the color and I would have been more upset if it had been black or something, but these weren't the feelings the therapist wanted to talk about'

Lauren Holmes’s debut collection is a wry and closely observed set of coming of age stories, in which characters’ personal and sexual development go hand in hand. Pitched somewhere between David Sedaris’s quirky examinations of suburban life and AL Kennedy’s funnier moments, Barbara the Slut is filled with young women trying to find out what they want from life, and how to get it.

Holmes has an enviable ability for crafting eye-catching opening lines. The first story, How Am I Supposed to Talk to You?, begins with the statement 'In Mexico City the customs light lit up green, which was lucky because I had fifty pairs of underwear with tags on them in my suitcase', providing a noir-ish set-up before immediately undercutting it with something more playful. The theme of unexpected choices is returned to in the opening of Desert Hearts, the story of a law-school grad who decides to work in a sex shop rather than pursue a legal career: 'When I moved to San Francisco with my fiancé, he started practicing law and I started selling toys'.

Although Holmes tries on numerous narrative voices, including men and golden retrievers, her focus is on young women. She explores the contradictions and flaws which define them as characters, from students like Tiffany (who ‘may have been a cheating whore but she was very polite’) and Beth ('a grosser but nicer version of any other girl') to Vivian, who works in a GUM clinic, but 'was thinking I might want to study public health, but I was also thinking I might want to move to the forest and eat berries and mushrooms and hibernate with the bears in winter'.

Holmes cleverly examines the way in which sexual identity fits into and supports our social identity. In the opening story, sexuality is closely linked to nationality and class; the narrator is free to express herself whilst she studies in America, but loses that degree of autonomy whilst visiting her family in Mexico. There, she helps to support her mother by adopting a stereotypical college-girl vibe to help her mother to sell the cargo of illicit Victoria’s Secret underwear which she has smuggled through customs. This experience is mirrored by Brenda, the law student–cum–sex shop employee in Desert Hearts, who feels compelled to act ‘lesbian’ to fit her boss’s expectations.

Relationships are also important social markers in school. In New Girls, Steph moves to a new school in a new country, and immediately commits a faux pas when she begins dating a popular boy. She is ostracised by her classmates, and comes to the conclusion that the relationship isn’t worth the social pressure: 'I was okay when I thought girls in Germany just didn't like me, same as girls in America. But when it turned out I had done something wrong and was being punished, I felt like I had ruined a perfectly good chance to be popular… if I had realized the solution to my problem was as simple as breaking up with Benjamin, I would have done it sooner'.

Barbara The Slut demonstrates a similar problem. She begins to receive hostile attention after sleeping with Roger, the pitcher on the baseball team, but it intensifies when she rejects Ralph, the other pitcher on the team, who spreads malicious rumours about her in retaliation. The word ‘slut’ is spray painted onto her locker, and she is shunned by the girls in her class. In truth, she says, 'I wasn't hard to get, but I did have standards. They were: good teeth and good skin and big hands. And I needed to know that boys were honest, which most of them were'. Holmes satirises the students who attempt to slut-shame Barbara, first likening them to an autistic child, who repeats the term without understanding, and then showing that they lack the boy's sense of humanity. 

Most of all, Holmes’s stories act as cautionary tales against the perils of settling. In Pearl and the Swiss Guy Fall in Love, Pearl jumps at the first opportunity of a relationship after a long barren spell, only to find that her new boyfriend immediately begins encroaching on her personal space. In I Will Crawl to Raleigh If I Have To, Vivian’s parents encourage her to walk away from ‘not bad but not good’ relationships, and look for excitement. She concedes that 'there were some red flags’ in her current relationship, like ‘the fact that I would fall asleep while he was going down on me and he would just keep going'.

Although on the surface Barbara the Slut appears to fit into the ‘literary bad girls’ genre, with its frank take on young female sexuality, this would be an oversimplification. Holmes doesn’t try to shock or break taboos, she simply tries to portray young women as they are: playful, independent, occasionally explicit, often unsure, trying out identities until they find the one that fits. This honesty, combined with her understated humour and ability to create finely balanced prose, makes this an intriguing and enjoyable debut, well worth checking out.