Dear Miss Maxfeld . . . What I’m really afraid of is that I am a homosexual human being. I wish you were one too but I don’t think it’s possible there could be so many in one school, do you? Probably there is only one person who is homosexual in one place at one time and that one person (I am afraid) is me . . .
After sixteen-year-old Lynn writes her thirty-seven-year-old English teacher a letter they embark on one of the funniest and saddest love affairs in fiction, shrouded in secrecy and guilt. Set in the year Kennedy was shot, all Lynn knows about “lezbos” is that they wear their hair in crew cuts, buy suits like her father’s, and sprout mustaches over their upper lips. Trying to pass, Lynn continues to neck with her boyfriend and make bigoted jokes with her friends. Feigning innocence with her parents, each night she checks the mirror for tell-tale signs of perversion. Profound, witty, poignant, and highly charged, In Thrall is the first in Jane DeLynn’s trilogy of novels on sexuality and authority. It is as believable in its depiction of a closeted teen as it is heartbreaking.
With an introduction by Colm Tóibín.
978-1-7395161-6-1
13.9 × 21.6 cm
280 pp paperback
19 November 2024
Fiction
£ 11.99
Alluring. Precocious. Impeccable. Tragic. In Thrall is a beguiling account of the perversion, angst and ego of adolescence.
Flawless comic timing.
A dazzlingly gritty exposure of a girlhood experience usually neglected by both private and public consciousness.
About the author
Jane DeLynn is the author of the widely acclaimed novels Leash, Don Juan in the Village, and Some Do. Her novel Real Estate was named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Her work has appeared in The Paris Review, Mademoiselle, Glamour, Harper’s Bazaar, The New York Times, the New York Observer and Tikkun, and she lived in Saudi Arabia as a correspondent for Mirabella and Rolling Stone during the Gulf War. She is also the author of three plays, and wrote the libretto for the children’s opera The Monkey Opera, composed by Roger Tréfousse, which premiered at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. She lives in Los Angeles.
Endorsements
Alluring. Precocious. Impeccable. Tragic. In Thrall is a beguiling account of the perversion, angst and ego of adolescence.
Flawless comic timing.
A dazzlingly gritty exposure of a girlhood experience usually neglected by both private and public consciousness.
All Lynn’s phobias, aversions and hang-ups make her exaggerated but real . . . The great triumph of this novel is that DeLynn has captured the way adolescents felt, talked, and behaved during the early 1960s.
Press
- The New York Review of Books Teacher's Pet
- Christopher Zeischegg Jane Delynn & Christopher Zeischegg in Conversation
- BOMB Interview: Jane DeLynn by Taylor Lewandowski
- EHFM Type on Paper
- The Irish Times Book reviews in brief: teenage love, the power of nature and the chaos of motherhood
- The Washington Post ‘In Thrall’ is a flinty, funny novel about growing up
- Era Journal 19, Winter 2024 "This feeling of uniqueness is part of the pattern": Jane DeLynn's In Thrall
- New York Magazine's Making It newsletter (ed. Emily Gould) A Witty and Ironic Coming-of-Age Novel From 1982
- Strong Words The Strong Words Hot List
- Something Curated Five Books to Read in November 2024
- Huck Huck’s November Cultural Recommendations: Korean cooking, a punk festival and a classic lesbian novel
- Los Angeles Times In Thrall
- Times Radio In Thrall (from 2:05:18)
- The Nation The Sheer Gusto of Jane DeLynn
- New York Magazine To Do: November 6-20
- The Paris Review A Pretty Girl, a Novel with Voices, and Ring-Tailed Lemurs
- 4Columns In Thrall
Dominique: The Case of an Adolescent
I have brought you a severed hand
In Pursuit of Revolutionary Love: Precarity, Power, Communities
Tosquelles: Healing Institutions
Holy Smoke
Wave of Blood
Bourgeois Coldness
Twenty Shadows
Darryl
London-rose | Beauty Will Save the World
Flood Tide
A Toast to St Martirià
Night Philosophy
How to Leave the World
This Poor Book
Artificial Gut Feeling
Stage of Recovery
What the Fire Sees—A Divided Reader
Self-portrait
Journey to the East of France
Again! Plenitude and Repetition
Another Sun
Let Them Rot
World of Interiors
Bosses
Disorganisation & Sex