Books like Margery Kempe

The late 80s through mid-90s was a fertile time for experimental queer writers. (It was an exciting time for me as well, as a queer Creative Writing student during that period.) From fiery Kathy Acker to quirky Kevin Killian to angry David Wojnarowicz to loving Joan Nestle to ice cold Dennis Cooper, the sheer range of mood and purpose of this group of fresh voices made reading them an exhilerating crap shoot. Would I be enlightened, as I was with Acker, moved and angered, as with Wojnarowicz? Or would I be disgusted, as I was with Cooper? And how would I use what I read in my own writing? The unifying factor across these diverse voices was the idea that our own stories, our personal narratives, could be centralized in works of so-called fiction. Genre boundaries were blurred, as were the boundaries between fiction and fact, love and sex, overt activism and internal exploration. I loved reading (and writing) these sorts of stories - the kinds of stories where the storyteller's own personal story is just as important as the story they are telling.Unfortunately, Margery Kempe is a huge failure in my book, despite it doing exactly what I described above. I wonder why I even wrote all of that as an intro. I suppose to justify to myself why I still admire these sorts of books, these kinds of experiments with structure, theme, perception, reality.Anyway, Glück constructs two stories that are supposed to comment on one another: Margery Kempe's love for Jesus and the author's own love for some babe. I started off annoyed and then moved into dismayed and ended with an irritated sort of bored. One can't criticize the writing itself, which is often beautiful and challenging and beautifully challenging - despite an intense focus on extremely explicit, un-romanticized sex. Or perhaps because of it? We all have our muses, and for many writers of that era, sex itself was a muse - especially since queer sex often automatically gave its practitioners a sort of outlaw status.But here's the thing: this is a book about a woman who loved God, written by an atheist (probably). It's utterly bizarre that the author decided that his obsession with some cute young thing would even equate with Margery Kempe's love of Jesus. Reducing Kempe's intensely spiritual connection to God to the ravings of some demented woman who is hungry for Jesus' dick is not just, well, reductive, it is genuinely diminishing. Diminishing in that particularly easy and ugly way that men diminish women all the time. In the modern parlance, Glück tries to mansplain Margery's complicated feelings as pure lust - albeit lust of a higher form, I guess. Lust to the/a higher power? LOL? But Margery Kempe - author of the first recorded autobiography and obviously a real person - was defined by her faith and her spirituality. She was not defined by her lusts! Love of the physical body is not the same as a spiritual connection, and sorry to anyone who still suffers under that delusion. I'm not saying one is better than the other, I'm saying that one is an apple and the other is an orange and that the author is a nitwit for pretending that they are the same fruit. Sorry, author.I'd like to say that at least the "personal narrative" portions of the book were interesting, but I can't. They are real at least, or were once real for the author. Sadly, the obsessive longings of an older gent for a younger lad are completely uninteresting to me. The genders could have been switched out and I would have been equally bored.