Lucy Jane Bledsoe

"One woman's authentic search to discover what matters."
-- Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"Bledsoe's sleek fourth novel, packed with complex female characters...is an intelligent, introspective, and smartly sarcastic story about the shackles of the past, the pressures of a present built on falsehoods, and the promise of reinvention and renewal in the future." -- Bookmarks 10 Best Books of the Year

"Eve Glass has turned her failed stint as an Olympic runner into pure marketing gold as a motivational speaker and the author of a self-help book. Her beauty and charisma have helped launch her onto the best-seller lists, but now, on the eve of an intense campaign for her new book, it seems her personal life is about to implode. Her ex-husband and former Olympics coach realizes that if he hopes to have a new relationship, he must let his golden girl, and their brief moment in the sun, go; a jilted ex-lover, now a New York Times reporter, sees a profile of Eve as the perfect means to achieve revenge; and her hotshot new manager is beginning to have serious doubts after having to bail Eve out of jail for shoplifting. With its appealing cast of strong, unusual women and its sophisticated sense of humor (a life coach who is a kleptomaniac is just one of many delicious ironies), Bledsoe’s fourth novel is a deftly written take on the search for authenticity."
-- Booklist

"Fluid and elegant." Jane and Jane

"Bledsoe sinks her teeth into subjects both hard and juicy here -- nostalgia, obsession, what can inspire a life or derail it -- and the result is an engrossing tale of tangled lives." -- Emma Donoghue, author, Life Mask

"Eve Glass, former Olympic runner and now promising author of two motivational books, is ripe with potential. She is beautiful, smart, athletic and charming. There's a glow about her that none of the other characters in Bledsoe's brilliant new novel seem able to resist.

But Eve's aura is misleading. It does not reflect her troubled childhood, her unrelenting need to be taken care of and nurtured, her predilection for shoplifting, and her unrequited love for a poet who lives clear across the country.

Eve's reality differs sharply from the stories of triumph, honor and beauty that fill her latest motivational book, If Grace is the Goal. In alternating points of view, Biting the Apple explores what happens when the polish protecting Eve's image begins to chip.

The character most insistent on maintaining Eve's facade is Nick Capelli, her ex of many titles (husband, coach and manager). Nick has his own problems, including his fiancée, Judith, whom he "loves" despite his minor problem with fidelity. Though his relationship with Eve is not sexual, and never really was, Judith forces him to stop coddling her and serving as her "everything."

Eventually, Nick gives up the reins and hires Alissa Smith as Eve's marketing director. But the job's easier said than done, especially for Alissa, whose previous clients have mainly been businessmen who were easily manipulated and actually cared about their public image.

And then there's Joan Ehrhart, a reporter for the New York Times who is trying to track down Eve for an interview. Joan's journalistic objectivity is questionable; she and Eve had a brief affair in high school (which Nick promptly ended in an effort to protect his running protégé). While Eve walked away mostly unscathed, Joan was left heartbroken and given the choice to seek therapy or change schools (she changed schools). Twenty years later, Joan now has a golden opportunity for redemption as she faces another profound decision.

Though Eve's deterioration is at the center of the story, the other characters' lives are also spiraling downward. Judith's demand ultimately forces Nick to examine why and how he has relied on Eve to be his everything. Alissa's attraction to Nick forces her to reconsider a relationship she had thought was everlasting. And in one of the richest scenes of the book, after a surprising discovery about her current partner, Joan begins to understand why she is unable to forgive Eve.

What is finally so magical about Biting the Apple is Bledsoe's analysis of expectations. The characters here are burdened not only by the expectations they hold for their own lives, but also by those they place on others. In stunning prose Bledsoe captures the difficulty of letting go of these expectations — and the promising quiet that follows." -- AfterEllen.com

"At first I thought that Lucy Jane Bledsoe's new book, Biting the Apple, was released at the wrong time of the year. Dipping into the first pages, I imagined I was reading a summer beach novel. The high school love relationship between Joan and Marianne that begins the book is a perfect and delightful catharsis for all who remember their high school crush and their first rejected overture of love. In Bledsoe's hands, however, this story is not an easily recollected fantasy; it is not a beach read for women (or men) wanting to recapture youthful love. Rather, Biting the Apple evolves into a much more psychologically riveting and significant story and, by its conclusion, is a haunting and profoundly satisfying novel.

Biting the Apple represents the contemporary generation of writing by lesbian novelists in which the central quest of the novel is no longer coming out, and not even romance or the working through of significant intimate relationships. Rather the plot and the subplots of Bledsoe and her cohorts reach beyond lesbian identity. In Biting the Apple, Bledsoe tells a tale of self-actualization in a world where lesbian identity is strong, and homophobia, while still present, is not a soul-crushing phenomenon. Bledsoe delivers four strong women -- lesbian and heterosexual -- who form the dramatic core of the book: Eve Glass (nee Marianne Wade), her high school crush, Joan, her personal manager, Alissa, and her contemporary love object, Audrey. Together these women provide different faces and narratives to illuminate the central struggles of the book -- women seeking lives of fulfillment, love, and integrity.

Bledsoe raises many more questions than answers. How are you named? What does your name mean? How do relationships from early childhood and adolescence shape our lives? How do we transform our lives? How do we seek greater integrity and honesty? All of Bledsoe's women are concerned with working through these questions in difficult and occasionally contradictory ways.

Biting the Apple begins with near whimsy and nostalgia, but by the conclusion it is a gripping psychological drama. Bledsoe deftly plots the book while unpeeling the layers and layers of her characters. The determination of apple or onion for Eve, Alissa, Joan, and Audrey will tantalize each reader: sweet or fragrant? You choose.

Perhaps because of Bledsoe's great compassion and affection for each of her characters, she structures the book so that it moves between the perspective of Eve, the protagonist, and her antagonist, Joan. The glimpses into Joan's psyche, however, are slim and not as well-developed. This structure initially was a barrier to entering the story and the lives of the people within it. Thus, this advice: keep reading.

Biting the Apple is a good read -- too dark for the beach, but well-suited for the coming wintry days. Begin it one morning and read into the darkness of the world, real and imagined." -- Lambda Book Report

"Adventure lovers are in for a treat. Bledsoe, whose novel Working Parts won the American Library Association Award for literature, offers an essay collection guaranteed to give armchair naturalists and travelers a glorious ride from Alaska to Antarctica. The author has spent a lifetime hiking and canoeing, seeking those moments of grace in the wilderness that she first discovered as a toddler when she wandered into an ice cave. Her wilderness experiences include moments of fear--a close encounter with a grizzly; transcendence--a humpback whale diving under her kayak; and irony--her foiled attempt to find solitude in the mountains. It is during her trip to Antarctica as a guest of the National Science Foundation that the uncompromising climate and breathtaking landscape teach her what is important in life. Action, dialogue, and musings are perfectly balanced in this hard-to-put-down book." -- Library Journal

"Layered, literary, and unflinchingly honest...She is unquestionably qualified to cover harsh terrain, both on foot and on the page. But she is also a standout among adventure writers because of her ambivalence about the contest between humans and their natural environment." -- World Hum: Travel Dispatches from a Shrinking Planet

"The Ice Cave is an exhilarating read....There's an aching beauty to her tales of travel." -- Passport Magazine

"It is a fine thing that people like Lucy Jane Bledsoe write about sleeping in the snow and camping in the desert. It means that people like me can learn about such adventures without having to undertake them." -- National Public Radio

"Bledsoe carves a comfortable niche for herself in women's travel writing with this essay collection covering everything from a regrettable vacation crewing a Caribbean sailing ship to a thrilling position as artist-in-residence in Antarctica. On each adventure recounted, Bledsoe emphasizes her quest for a deeper understanding of the wild. After a dangerous episode in the Sierras, she writes, "I quickly saw that neither grace nor will could be understood without looking deeply at fear, a theme that had arisen time and again in my writings about the wild." Bledsoe finds that fear comes in all shapes and sizes, from sighting suspected UFOs in Colorado to wolves in Alaska. She faces her most dangerous moments in Antarctica, identifying with Ernest Shackleton because, "in spite of his enormous accomplishments, he knew that yielding was exactly what he must do, over and over again in the wilderness." Bledsoe has crafted a very engaging and often humorous collection with an impassioned voice and clear dedication to her subject matter."
-- Booklist

"Lucy Jane Bledsoe is an explorer in the finest sense of the word. In her latest book,The Ice Cave, she tackles not only the physical challenges of wilderness, but the emotional and pesonal meanings of exploration in the 21st century....If these stories were fiction, it would be heady stuff. But these blasts of reality are compelling because of the truths they reveal about the world, about the writer, and about the inherent quest for meaning that humans carry....The essence of exploration as a way of looking at the world is palpable in these pages." -- Lambda Book Report

"[Bledsoe] covets the silence, the solitude, the raw beauty, the sense of connection -- and she captures these feelings with gripping grace in this vibrant outdoor-adventure memoir. She also loves the terror of wild spaces, an emotion she expresses with an honesty and intensity that are quite exhilarating." --Q Syndicate Book Marks

"In this series of essays on one woman's relationship with wilderness and the world, Bledsoe explores fear, exhilaration and will as she bikes mountain tracks seeking mountain lions, encounters wolves in Alaska, wrestles with the lure of summits buried in unexpected snow.

Seeking a healing solitude she backpacks alone into the wilderness and finds the scariest animal of all - hunters with whiskey. She explores an intimate, harrowing fear in the Mojave, terrorized by mysterious lights. And faces her fear of water on a working/sailing vacation with her longtime lover.

While Bledsoe's evocation of nature and solitude is vivid and intense, the most involving essays are those exploring human conflict. Moments of high comedy run up against fear-born anger in Bledsoe's sailing tale. Expecting sun-drenched days on deck, she and Pat arrive to find the boat damaged by a storm, its gaff lashed to the deck. " `That's the gaff?' Surely a part that size was not optional." Island-hopping visions dissolve into days of backbreaking work and belly-clenching fear as storms batter the crippled craft.

The best essay - and the longest - is Bledsoe's account of her first trip to Antarctica. Curious and untutored, she has many narrow escapes, inspiring a friend to design a plaque reading "'No, Lucy, no!" But she gets to see penguins and seals, spends a night in a self-built ice shelter and learns to love a place so inhospitable to humans death is just one small misstep away. (As she has since been back a couple of times since, readers will hope she is planning a longer book on Antarctica).

This is an honest - at times wrenchingly so - exploration of a personal relationship with wilderness, adrenaline and endorphins. Bledsoe combines adventure and physical effort with soul-searching and makes a sympathetic connection with the reader. This is a book for anyone who has wondered what people get out of extreme sport and for those who like a bit of human uncertainty with their armchair adventuring."
-- Portsmouth Herald