Naked in the Promised Land: A Memoir

Rating:
Summary: Required reading for any woman loving woman
Review: An outstanding personal memoir and documentary of mid-twentieth century lesbian life. Faderman's autobiography is an essential accompaniment to her lesbian history books. As a young lesbian, this book has given me a much deeper insight into life "before Stonewall" and during the earliest stages of the gay rights and women's lib movements. The writing itself *glows* and is far more powerful than any novel that I have read in a long time. This book is an absolute must-read for any lesbian, and will be an enlightening journey for any reader, gay or straight or anywhere in between.

Rating:
Summary: Lillian's best yet
Review: By far, Lillian's best yet. Her previous writings were way too heady for me, but this one held my attention. For those looking for the juicy tidbits of Faderman's personal life, this book pretty much hits the spot. I am looking forward to the sequel -- this woman has much more to tell.

Rating:
Summary: One Eye Closed ?
Review: I finally snagged a copy of the book and did not put it down to do anything but eat and sleep. As a young lesbian who is not nearly thankful enough for her older lesbian sisters, I could not believe what Lillian went through in her life.
A few people have summarized the book, but I'll tell you what had me glued to the pages: Lillian's determination. She always succeeded whether she was trying to become a movie star, get better grades in high school, trick a strip club into believing she was famous (and therefore making more money), make her mother and aunt believe she was straight, get her PhD, move up the ranks at a university, come out as a lesbian and lesbian mom, and become a world-renown author.
She was a pioneer, believing in herself when there was no guarantee that she would succeed. She hoped for the best, worked hard, and managed to change higher education all over the country. Thank you, Lillian!

Rating:
Summary: Riveting!
Review: I finally snagged a copy of the book and did not put it down to do anything but eat and sleep. As a young lesbian who is not nearly thankful enough for her older lesbian sisters, I could not believe what Lillian went through in her life.
A few people have summarized the book, but I'll tell you what had me glued to the pages: Lillian's determination. She always succeeded whether she was trying to become a movie star, get better grades in high school, trick a strip club into believing she was famous (and therefore making more money), make her mother and aunt believe she was straight, get her PhD, move up the ranks at a university, come out as a lesbian and lesbian mom, and become a world-renown author.
She was a pioneer, believing in herself when there was no guarantee that she would succeed. She hoped for the best, worked hard, and managed to change higher education all over the country. Thank you, Lillian!

Rating:
Summary: HOW NAKED CAN YOU GET? VERY!!!
Review: I'm a voracious reader --- and a lesbian --- and I know the differences between pretty good, good, and *very* good writing. And I'm a staunch fan of Faderman's books, rushing to buy each time this prolific writer publishes another. It's really not too much to say that starting with her ground-breaking `Surpassing The Love Of Men', Lillian Faderman has literally created recognizable modern "lesbian scholarship", and spent a lifetime dragging, pushing, and willing the subject of love between women into the category of "academic respectability". (What university, including the majors, doesn't have its women's studies, gay and lesbian studies, and gay and lesbian student groups? *Yale* has even given her a prestigious award for lesbian scholarship --- which means that Yale now not only recognizes the brilliance of her work, but the academic validity of lesbian studies. How important that is to a group that has been denied legitimization for so long! And how many scholars now owe their careers to her?)

The personal help and self-esteem her work and those classes and student groups have given countless women can never be known.

As to style, while her research is impeccable and her intellect is beyond brilliant, Faderman has always had the knack of being able to thread that difficult cat-dance between dry academic writing and "the other kind"; it takes a *very* good writer to write serious books that are enjoyable to read for the sheer pleasure of their writing as well as for the information they contain and the theories they propound. A *very* good writer; I didn't think she could do any better.

But in `Naked In the Promised Land', something's happened to Faderman's writing. Some major breakthrough. Some evolutionary step. Some quantum leap. It is instantly recognizable. Perhaps the process of writing this book was cathartic. Perhaps writing this book meant getting so close to the memories it evokes for her that it pulled away a layer of psychic skin; certainly there is an immediacy, an urgency, a sheer, stark power in her writing that suggests this. No bland treacle here! Faderman pulls out all the stops, and yet she wields her scalpel with a deft humanity, as well as with a merciless accuracy --- and to be fair, she is most merciless with herself. We are left with a mesmerizing tour-de-force, an autobiography so vivid, so probing and so honest that it reads like a stunning novel --- and what makes it even more stunning is that it is true.

This book is not just another book about childhood and adolescence, about coming out, about coming of age. Like a thread sewing all the pages together this book is about her mother. It's about the terrible guilt of a mother, the terrible guilt and powerlessness of a daughter; a childhood filled with madness and dysfunctional love; the stigma of being the illegitimate Jew daughter of an immigrant Jew mother; hilarious moments and lovely moments brief as firelies; the squalors that are both social and surrounding; the blurred lines between prostitution and almost-prostitution and between pimp and lover; cruelty as a self-defense technique; the sexual predators (male and female) that sidle close on those little cat feet; the conscious decision to use her own intense sexual magnetism *against* those predators and make of it a path into a PhD. A plethora of lost characters, and of tragi-comic characters, too. But most of all it is about Faderman's sheer passion --- the passion to rescue someone and to "make it better", the passion to *be* something for someone *else's* sake, the passion to survive and transcend and triumph, and the passion to have her own child --- but above all and underlying all, it is a book about the passionate bond that exists between mother and daughter, no matter what.

`Naked In The Promised Land' is a shattering book; one of the two or three most brilliant lesbian books in the last fifty or more years. It will grab your heart tight from the very first page, and amaze you through to the very last.

Rating:
Summary: An intense love story
Review: It sounds unbelievable: an illegitimate child who early in life realized she loved women; who stripped for men to finance her education (starting while she was still in her mid-teens); who earned a PH.d. and a professorship. But Lillian Faderman draws you into her life with immediacy, passion and humor. While still in high school, she walks a razor's edge, her 38-inch bust attracting sexual predators of both genders who alternatively coax and shove her towards the prostitution -- to her the ultimate degradation. Her struggling, psychologically disturbed, immigrant mother is both an inspiration for bettering herself and a warning against succumbing to the sordidness that so often surrounds her. Faderman acquires both male and female lovers but her strongest love is for her mother and her Aunt Rae. The book is striking for the lack of bitterness; you get a sense of a child's early love for the parent who can do no wrong. Or maybe it's more like the parent's unconditional love for the child, as Faderman so often had to mother her own parent. Really an inspirational story and thanks for throwing in those '50s pin-up pictures.

Rating:
Summary: An Honest Look at an Unusual Life
Review: Lillian Faderman's latest book relates the development of the fatherless child of an immigrant mother from grubby urchin to "out-of-control" teenager to internationally respected scholar and honored professor. It is a fascinating Bildungsroman told in vivid prose -- bound to touch all readers deeply.
Keep it up Lillian! You get better all the time!

Rating:
Summary: One Eye Closed ?
Review: Ms. Faderman has always been an outstanding scholar, giving the academic and Lesbian worlds her well researched, and highly informative books about Lesbians and Lesbianism. She has also written other scholarly works that are highly recommended, if not a little heavy for most readers. In her latest venture, her memoir " Naked in the Promise Land", Ms. Faderman shows her readers another side of her makeup, her personal side. The Memoir is as interesting for what it reveled about Ms. Faderman's past life as well as what has been carefully left out. Readers may well have to wait for a bioghapher to tell the complete story of Lillian Faderman's life for it appears that she is willing to go only so far in its telling.
What is also a point to note is the muse that Ms. Faderman has chosen to use. It defiantly is not the carefully structured formal English she used for her academic books, nor should it be. However, as a memoir it reads more like an Ann Bannon or Clair Morgan novel, and this, perhaps, is part of its charm as well as its draw.
Finally, in the telling of part of her life story the reader is made aware that Ms. Faderman is a consummate actress. After all she studied hard to learn the techiques. As such, one has to wonder if what she has presented to the world after her "Sunset Strip" life, is nothing more than another act in one more carefully constructed costume.

Rating:
Summary: A promise to expose a personal truth in all its nakedness
Review: Ms. Faderman's story could have been a riveting novel, except that the series of events would have stretched our incredulity for its bigger-than-life experiences that could only be believed in the real world, not in fiction.

Lillian goes through derivatives of her name as Lil or Lily, with each name representing a phase in her turbulent life. She tells the extraordinary story of growing as a very poor girl to an unwed mother who had made a series of very poor choices she lives to regret. These life changing decisions haunt not only the mother, who is given to bouts of depression and temporary loss of her faculties, but deeply affect her daughter's life and choices.

From struggling to become an talented actress with "a bad face, a good body," to become a sex model--at fourteen--to older men with cameras shooting her photographs for their private pleasure, Lillian's freefall is almost certain. But in a last moment stroke of realization--supported by an encouraging teacher--she returns to high school.

In years to come, as Lillian holds on by her teeth to her continuing education, she continues to make ends meet as a pin-up model. The minimum wage in the 50s and 60s in more conventional occupations is way below living wages. (The author saves herself no embarrassment as she peppers the book with actual photographs of her naked poses.) At the same time, never doubting her homosexual makeup, she falls in and out of relationships, most of which start great, last for a good while, then wither away. All the while Lillian puts out a semi-respectable front for the sake of her mother and aunt, including marrying a gay man and later dating a straight man.

Once she reaches adulthood and finishes her graduate studies, in a university campus she had never planned to stay for more than one school year, Dr. Faderman rises up the ranks and is given opportunities to develop one of the earliest women's studies programs in the county--and the first to celebrate gay writing.

A wonderful, riveting book that is highly recommended both for its fluid prose as for it story-telling of a remarkable life...