Monica Drake

Clown Girl by Monica Drake is a comic novel that has captured the hearts of many. You heard about it from Chuck Palahniuk while on tour, our book groups are raving about it, and several of us here at the St. Helens Book Shop recommend it daily. Our editions are available signed by both Monica and Chuck Palahniuk, who wrote the intro in the novel.

From the Introduction, as penned by Chuck Palahniuk:

Welcome to the book of my arch enemy. “Rival” would be a nicer word, but let’s be honest.

In 1991, in Tom Spanbauer’s kitchen, where our whole workshop of beginning writers still fit around his dinky kitchen table, every week Monica Drake was the star. The stories she read to us … about sitting all night locked inside the Portland Art Museum, alone to guard the ancient mummy of a Chinese empress, staring at a dish filled with the preserved contents of the mummy’s stomach—mostly ancient pumpkin seeds. As Monica talked about being locked behind steel gates and barred doors and bulletproof Plexiglas, the rest of Tom’s students, we’d forget to breathe.

Writing this introduction, I’m not doing an old friend a favor—I’m paying a decade-old debt. This isn’t charity or flattery—this is honesty.

Writers are nothing if not rivals, but competition as good as Monica Drake is a blessing.

Clown Girl is more than a great book. Clown Girl is its own reality.

We should all have an arch enemy this brilliant.

—Chuck Palahniuk, author of Fight Club

Visit her online at monicadrake.com.

Clown Girl (Paperback) -- signed or inscribed

$15.95

Model: CLOWN07PB

Inscription?:

If you would like the book inscribed to a certain person, type their NAME here.

Autographed and inscription available - from Monica, as well as Chuck Palahniuk.

IN THIS DARKLY COMIC NOVEL, Clown Girl lives in Baloneytown, a neighborhood so run down and penniless that drugs, balloon animals and even rubber chickens contribute to the local currency. Against a backdrop of petty crime, Clown Girl struggles to find her place in the world of high art; she has dreams of greatness and calls on the masters, Charlie Chaplin, Kafka and da Vinci for inspiration. But all is not art in her life: in an effort to support herself and her under-employed performance-artist boyfriend, she is drawn into the world of paying jobs, and finds herself unwittingly turned into a "corporate clown," trapped in a cycle of meaningless, high paid gigs which veer dangerously close, then closer to prostitution.

Using the lens of clown life to illuminate a struggle between artistic integrity and an economic reality, Monica Drake has created a novel that embraces the high comedy of early film stars -- most notably Chaplin and W.C. Fields. At the same time Drake manages to raise questions about issues of class, gender, economics and prejudice.

This debut novel is an stunning blend of the bizarre, the humorous, and the gritty. The novel resists easy classification, but is completely accessible to a general audience. Introduction written by Chuck Palahniuk, friend and colleague.

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