Apples & Oranges

My Journey through Sexual Identity

by Jan Clausen

**Sexuality and identity are the twin goddesses that lend Jan Clausen’s Apples & Oranges its grace and urgency.**

In the late 1980s, after more than a decade living within a strong Brooklyn lesbian community with her female lover and their daughter, Clausen travels to a war zone in Nicaragua, where she falls in love with a West Indian male lawyer. Her memoir is brimming with intimate physical and emotional details of her personal journey, but perhaps what sets it apart are the deeply informed historical and philosophical lenses through which she examines her own experience. Deeply felt, intensely thoughtful, gorgeously written, Apples & Oranges is a testament to the power and peril of desire. It is also a dazzling examination of the ways in which our search for love and happiness intersect. What does it mean to be straight? What does it mean to be queer? Jan Clausen gives us not one but many answers to these questions.

Collected in

Radical Women Activist Stories, Biographies, and Memoirs of Conscience

Buying options

Paperback

$16.16

$17.95

Publish Date: 2017-07-25

ISBN: 9781609807498

Pages: 256

Ebook

$9.59

$15.99

Publish Date: 2017-07-25

ISBN: 9781609807504

Pages: 256

“Apples & Oranges is a brilliant—and stirring—book. Jan Clausen has courageously used her own life as a way of illuminating the crucial issue of ‘identity’ currently embroiling the culture. With remarkable subtlety and painfully taut candor, she has managed to combine two genres, memoir and social criticism, into a complex, powerful exploration of how we decide internally to self-label and publicly announce ourselves. This is a work that will be looked back on as seminal, as a true trailblazer.”

– Martin Duberman, author of Haymarket, In White America, and Stonewall

“Jan Clausen's memoir is more relevant now than ever. Apples & Oranges is at once a riveting personal narrative about the sacrifices we make for love, and an intellectual examination of the ways that intimacy, identity, and community entangle in our lives and selves. It is a book that shows us with grace and stirring honesty how severing an attachment—to our lovers, to our self-conceptions—can collapse everything we thought permanent, and reveal what truly is.”

– Melissa Febos, author of Whip Smart and Abandon Me

JAN CLAUSEN is the author of a dozen books in a range of genres, including Veiled Spill: A Sequence, from GenPop Books (2014) and her memoir Apples & Oranges. Other recent poetry collections are From a Glass House and If You Like Difficulty. Prose titles include the story collection Mother, Sister, Daughter, Lover and the novels Sinking, Stealing and The Prosperine Papers. Clausen's poetry and creative prose are widely published in journals and anthologies; her book reviews and literary journalism have appeared in Boston Review,Ms.,The Nation, Poets & Writers, and The Women's Review of Books. A resident of Brooklyn since the 1970s, she maintains close ties to the Pacific Northwest, where she was born and raised. The recipient of writing fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts, she taught for many years in the undergraduate creative writing program at Eugene Lang College, the New School. Currently she teaches in the Goddard College MFA in Writing Program and at New York University.