The Letters of Mina Harker

- Blurb -

Bellamy' s debut novel revives the central female character from Bram Stoker' s Dracula and imagines her as an independent woman living in San Francisco during the 1980s. Hypocrisy' s not the problem, I think, it' s allegory the breeding ground of paranoia. The act of reading into--how does one know when to stop? KK says that Dodie has the advantage because she' s physical and I' m only psychic. . . . The truth is: everyone is adopted. My true mother wore a turtleneck and a long braid down her back, drove a Karmann Ghia, drank Chianti in dark corners, fucked Gregroy Corso . . . --Dodie Bellamy, The Letters of Mina HarkerFirst published in 1998, Dodie Bellamy' s debut novel The Letters of Mina Harker sought to resuscitate the central female character from Bram Stoker' s Dracula and reimagine her as an independent woman living in San Francisco during the 1980s--a woman not unlike Dodie Bellamy. Harker confesses the most intimate details of her relationships with four different men in a series of letters. Vampirizing Mina Harker, Bellamy turns the novel into a laboratory: a series of attempted transmutations between the two women in which the real story occurs in the gaps and the slippages. Lampooning the intellectual theory-speak of that era, Bellamy' s narrator fights to inhabit her own sexuality despite feelings of vulnerability and destruction. Stylish but ruthlessly unpretentious, The Letters of Mina Harker was Bellamy' s first major claim to the literary space she would come to inhabit.