I love that this book concentrates on love stories between women. A given from the title, you might expect, but even with that I was pleasantly surprised by the sheer warmth of the book. It was a joy to read about so many lesser-known lesbians from the past.

I received a free e-galley of this book from Netgalley in exchange for a review.

This is a book that really defies easy characterisation. It’s basically a history of lesbians, told through a different woman each chapter: from Sappho to Gloria Anzaldúa.

My response to this book is very much a personal one. Lesbian archives and the idea of ‘uncovering’ lesbian history was a huge part of my MA work. I ‘used to be’ a lesbian for several years, although now I’m too nonbinary and bisexual to really feel like one anymore. So, I really appreciated this book from a personal perspective. I’m glad to read a new perspective on the lesbian archive, and the author’s expansive definition of lesbian to include people who weren’t necessarily women and who didn’t necessarily exclusively love women felt really good to me.

I feel like I can relate this personal response because so much of this book is about the author’s own life and her writing of this book. That’s what makes this book so hard to categorise: it’s a history of lesbians, but also a lesbian history. I really appreciate that effort to resist genre, even if it didn’t fully work for me. The end result was just a little too piecemeal for me; I’d have liked something more to string it altogether. Still, this mostly worked really well for me and I really think this marks a new point in lesbian nonfiction writing.

This book was a magical walk through lesbian history. Amy covers everything from androgyny and cross dressing, to women in sports, drag, lesbians as caretakers through the AIDS crisis and much more. History from archives both remembered and forgotten intertwined with their own personal tales of queer experiences came together as a really engaging queer history book of sorts and im so thankful i agreed to this e-arc as i fell head over heels for the lesbians who laid footsteps for me to walk upon as a lesbian myself

I have my reservations about books that deliberately fictionalise parts of the factual stories they are telling. It seems to happen a fair bit in books that deal with lesbian history. I understand this is because lesbian history has, for so long been one that has been hidden or in a more sinister way, erased, but it still makes me squirm a bit. Lesbian Love Story does this with varying degrees of success. The love story of the title has multiple meanings in the book itself. This is a book about the author's love for her lesbian history, the women who make up that history and her own experiences of falling in love with what it means to her to be a lesbian. The celebration and raising up of the women she chooses is lovely. I also enjoyed the elements of her own story she chose to tell. It broke down for me when she filled in the gaps that were not there in documents or other people's memory, mainly because it felt like the author shoe horning her own desires into the stories and it broke the spell the stories cast by themselves. The book gets stronger and to me, much more coherent and interesting towards the end, where there is less to guess at because more lesbian history was documented and lesbians were able to be much more open about their lives.

i generally find this sort of autofictive, history skimming mode a bit self-indulgent and sloppy, but this book is written with lots of warmth and love and sparking heart. hard not to feel moved by it, but not sure how much of that is a function of the content - love stories lost to history and the crush of silence, joy seeping up in the face of oppression, the aids crisis - and how much of it is due to the actual book itself. either way, i felt v tight chested upon finishing it.

The subtitle of Amelia Possanza’s book is a little misleading, this isn’t so much history as unorthodox memoir and although on the surface it focuses on a series of Sapphic couples it frequently uses them as a means to tease out broader questions about gender, desire and identity. Possanza was isolated growing up, a lone lesbian in environments where she often found herself in the position of awkward outsider. Even after moving to New York and joining a queer swim team, she found herself mostly in the company of gay men. So, she set herself a project of constructing her own specific, lesbian history drawing on the lives of a selection of past women she might view as possible role models - supporting her in her attempts to map out a future for herself as a lesbian and probe into key aspects of her personal experience. She delved into archives and devoured lesbian histories, slowly compiling a list of women she wanted to know more about. Mostly these are women who also lived in New York and who shed light on what it might have meant to be a woman who loved women at different points in America’s history.

Possanza opens with Mary Casal (Ruth Fuller Field), who published one of the first autobiographies exploring lesbian desire. Thinking about Casal and her relationships, and their place within nineteenth-century notions of the ‘romantic friendship’ provides a space for Possanza to reflect on her own sexual desires. Black, working-class lesbian and stage performer Mabel Hampton who later co-founded the Lesbian Herstory Archive offers a glimpse of lesbian subcultures in 1920s and 1930s Harlem, as well as raising issues about lost histories, class and white privilege. The treatment of athlete Babe Didrikson Zaharias exposes misogynistic attitudes towards women in sport in the 1950s, as well as the suffocating constraints of conventional femininity, in turn leading to a discussion of Possanza’s sporting background and personal discomfort with gendered expectations about her body and self-presentation. Something that’s developed further in Possanza’s assessment of the life of Rusty Brown, a forerunner of contemporary ‘drag culture’ and someone whose “tendencies” led to a period of incarceration in a psychiatric facility. A longing for community leads Possanza to the work of Gloria Anzaldúa queer theorist and activist in the Chicana feminist movement during the 1970s, someone who also holds out the possibility of thinking about lesbian identity as political. Amy Hoffman’s work with ACT UP in the 1980s links to Possanza’s close friendships with gay men and thoughts about the ways in which queer communities might offer alternative forms of family and intimate connection. Possanza departs from her general script to include Sappho both as an iconic historical figure and as a link to Possanza’s childhood and time spent with her Classicist father.

Possanza’s partly indebted here to Saidiya Hartman’s approach in Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments. Like Hartman, Possanza includes a series of creative reconstructions of her subjects’ lives, attempting to fill in the gaps and silences in the records that remain of their existence. When everything comes together this is a really fascinating book but there were times when I found the links between Possanza and her chosen women a little too forced or tangential or when the discussion seemed overly dry. Overall, Possanza’s idiosyncratic blend of memoir and creative biography is inventive and accessible but that accessibility could sometimes detract from her attempts to cover more complex issues, particularly around gender, making some of her more general arguments feel sweeping or insubstantial. But the experiences of the women represented here are consistently compelling, as are the histories they reveal.

This is an intriguing and well researched book that made me think and learn something new. I never thought about how the topic of the books and I think it's well done and interesting.
Recommended.
Many thanks to the publisher for this ARC, all opinions are mine

I think this was a really good exploration of lesbians throughout history and how they’ve always been around, despite the erasure. It had the authors’ personal experiences woven throughout, as well.

As a lesbian, it felt very validating, and I enjoyed learning about our history. I also liked that it didn’t ignore trans women. However, I would have liked a little more focus on them, maybe a chapter devoted to a trans woman. I did like that the author noted some of these masc lesbians may have been trans men, which is something I wonder myself.

I recommend it a lot! The only thing making this a four star instead of a five is that, for whatever reason, it was a struggle to get through and took me a while to read. Maybe it’s because the chapters are long or it was the writing, I don’t know, but it was worth it anyway.

I’d describe this book as realistic fiction. The author has done a fantastic job of creating imaginary characters and situations that depict the world and society. The characters focus on themes of growing, self-discovery and confronting personal and social problems. The language is clear, concise, and evocative, with descriptions that bring the setting and characters to life. Dialogue is natural and authentic, and the pacing is well-balanced, with enough tension and release to keep the reader engaged.

The E-Book could be improved and more user-friendly, such as links to the chapters, no significant gaps between words and a cover for the book would be better. It is very document-like instead of a book. A star has been deducted because of this.

This is a first for me by the author and one I enjoyed and I would read more of their work. The book cover is eye-catching and appealing and would spark my interest if in a bookshop. Thank you to the author, publisher and Netgalley for this ARC.

From the first pages, Lesbian Love Story quickly became one of my favorite reads of the year. It is the perfect blend of memoir and biography, both captivating and infused with lyrical writing, and each page got me hooked. It's clear that the author has poured a lot of passion into her archival research and writing, and that's what makes this book so gripping. Lesbian Love Story was heart-wrenching in the best way possible, and I thoroughly enjoyed reading it through the tears and smiles.

Thank you so much to NetGalley and the publisher for providing me an eARC in exchange for an honest review

Lesbian Love Story is a book that blends memoir and biography to explore the lives and romances of seven main figures, plus the author, whilst arguing for using past stories like these to illuminate the present and fight for the future. Each chapter explores a different love story from the archival research that Possanza has done, focusing mostly on one of the two people and exploring their life and how their actions and experiences fit into a broad definition of lesbianism.

What I didn't realise from the blurb is that out of the seven, all except Sappho spent time in New York (to connect with the author and the memoir element), and there's generally a real focus on twentieth century America. Obviously, you can write a book with a focus, but probably the blurb needs to make this clearer, highlighting the New York connection or something.. The ordering of the chapters is chronological apart from Sappho who is chapter 4, and I wasn't really sure why this was—it was a bit confusing to suddenly have Sappho discussed here and not at the start (or even at the end).

The chapters tend to explore broader issues affecting the main "protagonists", plus weaving in memoir elements from the author, so there's a lot to move between, and on top of that there's a lot of direct quotes from the individuals from the archives mixed in as well using italics. It is an interesting way to approach delving into archive history and trying to bring people to life, but at times I found it too easy to get lost. The chapter about Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherríe Moraga was most interesting for me, as it explored some of the histories of lesbian communities in the 1970s and 80s particularly and some of the arguments around lesbian separatism (and does mention how this has evolved into modern discourse, but only briefly). The chapter about queer friendship and AIDS very notably lacked any mention of trans women and the impact of AIDS upon them, and in general it is surprising in a book that argues for seeing the variation in lesbian experience and identity to not cover a trans lesbian in one of the chapters.

I liked that the ending called for radical change and using these historical figures from the archives as part of this work, as it gave a sense of purpose beyond uncovering histories, to look to the past but also the future. The acceptance that lesbians can have very diverse experiences was also a good note to end on, and in general the ending shows how queer history is important in allowing us to be united rather than divided.

Overall, the book wasn't always for me, as sometimes the threads it wove together didn't always work, and I wish it had maybe explored more the New York connection if that was the reason for having those figures chosen to cover. However, there's a lot of engaging content and I did learn about people I'd never heard of before.