{"id":3849,"date":"2015-04-28T19:46:27","date_gmt":"2015-04-28T19:46:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/heatherhaley.com\/hh2\/?p=3849"},"modified":"2015-04-28T20:07:55","modified_gmt":"2015-04-28T20:07:55","slug":"heather-haleys-brash-novel-the-town-sluts-daughter-reviewed-in-the-georgia-straight-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/heatherhaley.com\/hh2\/?p=3849","title":{"rendered":"Haley Returns to Punk Past; ” the Town Slut’s Daughter reviewed in the Georgia Straight"},"content":{"rendered":"

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“Heather Haley’s brash novel details the risky experiments that defined life in the subcultures of the late 1970s.” And 80s. And 90s, etcetera. I haven’t quit; stubborn that way.<\/p>\n

I do wish they\u2019d credited Gabor Gasztonyi<\/a> for his lovely portrait of the author but thank you books editor Brian Lynch, and Connie Kuhns<\/a>, for the review<\/a>, I admire your writing. I will be sharing excerpts from the novel at the Storm Crow Reading Series<\/a>, Thurs, June 18.<\/p>\n

The Town Slut\u2019s Daughter\u2028 <\/strong>By Heather Haley. Howe Sound Publishing, 314 pp, softcover<\/em><\/p>\n

A girl walks into a bar. Eventually, she gets out alive. This is the story of Fiona Larochelle, an emotionally abused teenager and runaway whose lost weekend begins in a filthy washroom in a Vancouver nightclub and ends years later on a Los Angeles freeway. Although the book is a work of fiction, the bit players are very real. When Fiona forms an all-female punk band, the Virgin Marries, she and her bandmates occupy the same historical space as D.O.A. and the Dishrags. It is the late 1970s. The Clash is coming to town. Everyone is spitting on one another.<\/p>\n

Fiona and her friends look for independence in all the wrong places. Their world is violent and ignorant and they are handicapped further by drugs and exploitative sex. It is experimentation run amok and told in graphic detail. Everybody\u2019s talking. They play music and argue politics. They play music and discuss art. They play music and talk dirty.<\/p>\n

Author Heather Haley, a well-regarded poet, filmmaker, and former editor at LA Weekly<\/em>, was in real life a musician and member of the Zellots, a groundbreaking Vancouver women\u2019s punk band. Knowing she survived those difficult and dangerous times, it\u2019s hard to resist making Fiona her avatar. The Town Slut\u2019s Daughter<\/em> reads (to me) as a recollection, as if Fiona is skimming over her life, trying to get it down before it is forgotten, trying to remember every single thing. There are images, lengthy diatribes, and famous people coming and going. We follow Fiona to New York, Las Vegas, and finally Los Angeles. She is running and constantly transforming.<\/p>\n

When Fiona finally succumbs, a deeper story begins and Haley\u2019s writing is powerful. Her depictions of Fiona\u2019s drug-saturated sexual and emotional abuse and her final battle out of darkness are as disturbing and realistic as anything in a Marianne Faithfull autobiography.<\/p>\n

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“Heather Haley’s brash novel details the risky experiments that defined life in the subcultures of the late 1970s.” And 80s. And 90s, etcetera. I haven’t quit; stubborn that way. I do wish they\u2019d credited Gabor Gasztonyi for his lovely portrait of the author but thank you books editor Brian Lynch, and Connie Kuhns, for the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/heatherhaley.com\/hh2\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3849"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/heatherhaley.com\/hh2\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/heatherhaley.com\/hh2\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/heatherhaley.com\/hh2\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/heatherhaley.com\/hh2\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3849"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"http:\/\/heatherhaley.com\/hh2\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3849\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3865,"href":"http:\/\/heatherhaley.com\/hh2\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3849\/revisions\/3865"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/heatherhaley.com\/hh2\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3849"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/heatherhaley.com\/hh2\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3849"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/heatherhaley.com\/hh2\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3849"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}