Endpapers spells new beginnings
In Endpapers, author Jennifer Savran Kelly ties the present to the past as her main character Dawn Levit searches for ways to untangle her place as a genderqueer person in post 9/11 New York City. Dawn is a bookbinder at the Met and an aspiring artist. She finds herself stuck between worlds with her male partner who prefers her masculine side and her inability to produce art in an almost post apocalyptic city where reminders of loss are abound.
While working on a book, Dawn discovers a torn off cover from a lesbian pulp novel from the 1950s. There is an illustration of a woman looking in a mirror and seeing a man’s face. Dawn’s shock and intrigue is immediate. As if this surprise is not synchronistic enough, there is also a love letter written in German from a Gertrude to Marta. Dawn sets out to find the author of the letter. Dawn, of Jewish descent, growing up in suburbia Long Island, sees the possibility of answers in Gertrude. Had this woman, in an even more oppressive era, found voice for her gender, for her love? And, if so, could some intrepid journey to find Gertrude and the history she carried, deliver Dawn to a new beginning, where confusion and shame take backseat to pride and certainty?
Savran Kelly gently guides us through Dawn’s thoughts, the dichotomy between her compulsion to unravel a mystery she thinks holds answers as well as her inner conflict regarding the absurdity in finding salvation through a stranger, who might not even exist. We see Dawn wandering the streets of York, photographically documenting queer culture that is hidden in plain sight, billboards with gender non conforming couples, and other street art that speaks to her nature.
With dozens of photographs, Dawn is nonetheless stymied in her art, her true passion, having not succeeded in producing something notable in some time. In the quest for Gertrude, she finds inspiration and decides upon a three dimensional mock up of the city peppered with graffiti art including a queer centerpiece. A collaboration networked through her first love from high school, when her gender role first came into question. Two lovers, or two halves of one person, on each of the Towers, in an eternal embrace that is about to take place.
Dawn does find Gertrude, whom she learned had started a secret society of gay women who would paste the lesbian pulp fiction to the covers of novels in a clandestine society. And underground band of rebels, counter culture asserting power through creativity. The women, who feared they would be caught reading the lesbian pulp, went to Gertrude’s father’s book bindery after hours, and would replace the covers of the pulps with rejects from other projects to make it look like they were reading Tolstoy or other natural sciences. The project grew as so many lesbian pulps were tragic and the women expressed more joyful lives they wished they could live, turning slim paperbacks in the bindery.
Dawn’s search for her place is current. While queer images no longer need to be coveted through code and subversion, the path to discovering one’s identity in a hetero normative world still speaks true. Sometimes the past can echo us to authenticity, and in Endpapers, we are lead on a time capsule journey of self understanding, acceptance and purpose.
