Author Description

<b>Bellamy's debut novel revives the central female character from Bram Stoker's <i>Dracula</i> and imagines her as an independent woman living in San Francisco during the 1980s.</b><br><br><i>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 ...</i><br>--Dodie Bellamy, <i>The Letters of Mina Harker</i><br><br>First published in 1998, Dodie Bellamy's debut novel <i>The Letters of Mina Harker</i> sought to resuscitate the central female character from Bram Stoker's <i>Dracula</i> 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, <i>The Letters of Mina Harker</i> was Bellamy's first major claim to the literary space she would come to inhabit.