The Pahrump Report

A challenging tale of love, scorn, and the desert life from feminist icon Lisa Carver. When Lisa lands in Pahrump, Nevada with her husband, drama unfolds as his addiction and dreams collapse into eventual divorce. Life is lived as Lisa has always lived it, in zen and acceptance of the good and bad. The story details her experiences and ends with her last relationship with Steve, a banker who has multiple secrets that, once revealed, show the reader the core of Lisa Carver.

In Patricia Lockwood’s No One Is Talking About This, the narrator describes flipping through a stack of books at her sister’s house.

“One of the books was a sex diary, which exerted the particular frontier charm of internet writing before 9/11. This sex diarist wore pigtails and had eyes like blue sequins, and lacked inhibition entirely. She made New Hampshire sound like a place you wanted to go: an endless orifice among black ice, buzzing like an OPEN 24 HOURS sign. Cups of coffee in the morning, adrenaline-fueled emails in the afternoon, solitary preparations for threesomes at night.”

Following the vogueish new evasive style, much of Lockwood’s novel avoids proper nouns, and she does not name her subject. But the sex diarist in question is identifiably the legendary memoirist, zine editor, and performance artist Lisa Carver, and the book is The Lisa Diaries — Carver’s 2002 anthology of sex writing, the third in a corpus of fourteen mostly self- and micro-published books… read more >