The book begins with the narrator, Lee, facing expulsion due to being caught with pot and a bunch of boys (sound familiar?). As a result, she has nowhere to go but doesn't want to go home to a father who sexually abuses her and a mother who helps him do it. Lee manages to travel to the horse circuit after making her friend repay a drug debt, and on her way there, she is molested by a man who is her seatmate. Through this we begin to see how Lee copes with the way others treat her. Given our culture's evergreen fixation with elite lives in spiral, I'm baffled that House Rules hasn't experienced a second wind like Heather Lewis' Notice. Perhaps this has something to do with the novel's rights: House Rules was a New Narrative gem published by Serpent's Tail during the early days of the UK house's short-lived US division. Then again, existing US NN house Semiotex(e) doesn't have a good record of intuitively republishing books when their authors reenter literary work consciousness (cough, Shulamith Firestone, cough).

urn:lcp:houserules00lewi:epub:3e1beb52-f262-44ec-ba88-1c6b906f88e9 Extramarc Yale Library Foldoutcount 0 Identifier houserules00lewi Identifier-ark ark:/13960/t24b43t30 Isbn 9780385472104 The rest of the story passes with scenes in hotel rooms, stables, schooling rings. Abuse and drugs, over and over again.. it's a cycle that never ends, and the author wants you to experience this cycle.. and how it feels to be trapped within it.

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Besides House Rules, Heather Lewis left behind two more novels; no horses, but like in House Rules very violent sexual episodes and a lot of drugs. Both offer as principal characters a wealthy couple who are addicted to sexually abusing teen-aged prostitutes. The Second Suspect is an apparent police procedural investigating the death of one of these girls. The other novel, Notice– published only after the author’s suicide – is a 1st person account by a teenaged prostitute who specializes in servicing businessmen commuters @ a suburban railway station car park. The two books are obviously closely related & artistically it makes sense to connect them. Not exactly spoilers in this review, but general outline of the plot (so you might want to avoid it!) As Aristotle pointed out long ago, we enjoy good representations in fiction of things we would not enjoy at all in real life, whether Oedipus stabbing himself in the eyeballs, or in Lee’s case, what it would feel like to mount a horse after being fisted. I cannot imagine wanting to be a bottom, but can see in being a sexual passive a form of misplaced spirituality, a wrong turn in the path to what Ignatius designated as the third level of humility - perfect identification with Jesus’ suffering. But tho’ some of the blurb descriptions of this book make it sound like a work of Lesbian S/M erotica, I did not find that @ all. The sex scenes seemed more descriptions of extreme unarmed combat or OTT hazing @ a very bad fraternity or military school. The very heavy drug use in the novel represents a Dionysiac spirituality, as in Donna Tartt’s The Secret History. (I’d known from my hospital experience the Dilaudid was the good stuff, but now I know why & that you can use it to control both horses & riders.) Like some other favorite characters, Lee is both extremely tough and very vulnerable. She doesn’t know how to recognize or repay generosity, yet she has an enormous capacity to endure abuse while retaining her personal dignity. Lccn 95069748 Ocr_converted abbyy-to-hocr 1.1.20 Ocr_module_version 0.0.17 Openlibrary OL819130M Openlibrary_edition urn:lcp:houserules0000lewi:lcpdf:5051e768-df1d-4539-9ce6-c961d6209890 Foldoutcount 0 Identifier houserules0000lewi Identifier-ark ark:/13960/t4tj8gm0r Invoice 1652 Isbn 0749395842

It's a deep and dark story, and what makes it work is the mystery of the show-jumping world. Not all of us are familiar with it, so there's a certain elusiveness. The story truly conveyed emotion and pain- when I read about the abuse Linda and Carl set their horses through, an example being a car battery used on a water jump, it gave me a very lonely and discomforting feeling. This book only makes me wonder- was there really someone like this, people who did this, and if so.. what happened to them? The situations are so odd that they feel real to me, but Heather can't answer these questions for me now. I wish she could. She does an excellent job of exploring the line between pain and pleasure in her work, and the relationships of those who walk it. It's a really dark, lonely sort of book. I don't know how to explain what I mean. It just left me sort of lost- but her writing was really good. The fact that nobody has any deeper biographical information from her.. It's like she's faded away from history. It took me a long time to find out what I know about her, from bits and pieces. Nobody else seems to think about her anymore. Lee always rode for the Cheslers, an old-money family who specializes in hunters. However, it's evident that Lee has always harbored a crush on Tory Markham, a woman who rides for the fast and dangerous pair, Carl and Linda Rusker. Lee finds the world of show-jumping more interesting than the hunters, giving readers impressions that hunter-jumping is stagnant even if there is a steady income. Warning: If you are looking for a book about horses and showing, this is NOT it. This is not the type of feel good, under dog winning the championship type of book. This is a book that shows the horse industry —that other aspect of the industry—that we know exists. And it’s graphic. Very, very graphic. NOTE: I didn’t include any plot spoilers, but if you’re a “less I know the better” kind of reader, I would wait to read any further.**A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact. Next, we have a lot of unanswered questions about some main characters: Carl is alleged to be married, but we never hear of the wife, any history of the wife, other than 2 references. Even when the main character, Lee, stays with them in between shows, the wife is never even alluded to, but many other characters have their stories and history laid out up front. Confusing.

Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2011-08-23 18:04:50 Boxid IA142422 Boxid_2 CH111901 Camera Canon EOS 5D Mark II City New York DonorThe book also shows us a network of adults who are too interested in passing judgement and making money to care about the treatment of the horses and riders, and women’s reputations take a much bigger hit than their male peers who are doing just as much (usually more) depraved stuff. This all adds up to a perfect storm for poor Lee to get trapped in an unsafe dynamic, even without the copious drugs she’s being given. An out lesbian, [6] her works explore aspects of American culture, such as the connections between power, drugs, sex, violence, love and justice. [3] Her girlfriend, Tory, is also very obviously a victim. Another thing that killed me was that under different circumstances these characters could be so happy, they could heal each other and be happy young lesbians in love, but they’ve experienced so much trauma that the only way they can interact with each other is through violent sex and drugs. It’s got the hopelessness of a true tragedy, to the point that you almost become accustomed to the tragedy by the end of the book and you’ve gotten comfortable with the fact that there’s just about no hope for these characters. Lewis's third and final novel, published posthumously, is as dark and gritty as her 1994 debut, House Rules Lccn 93025614 Ocr_converted abbyy-to-hocr 1.1.20 Ocr_module_version 0.0.17 Openlibrary OL1416092M Openlibrary_edition

I'd never read a book authored by someone who was once a very close friend. Add to that that I've only recently found out she became an author. And that she took her own life, before I made this discovery. Ocr tesseract 4.1.1 Ocr_detected_lang en Ocr_detected_lang_conf 1.0000 Ocr_detected_script Latin Ocr_detected_script_conf 0.9701 Ocr_module_version 0.0.10 Ocr_parameters -l eng Old_pallet IA-NS-2000168 Openlibrary_editionAlthough the book is powerfully honest and brutal I had problems more with the writing and character development. I suppose it just takes time to get used to how Heather Lewis wrote her novels. I admire the way she laid Lee's emotions and entire life bare for the reader to witness. It's just at the end of the book I didn't really feel like I knew Lee at all. And the entire world of show horses is completely unknown to me. I understand Lewis knew about it well and she certainly was able to show that through her words. I just wasn't able to picture any of the scenes in my head that contained the horses, which was a important thing to Lee. In the early 80's we were coworkers, neighbors, and cohorts. I would have loved to have seen a book by her about those times, as she could clearly speak of them better than I could. It would've been an amazing trip down memory lane of a time when she, my girlfriend and myself were the oddest kids in the sleepy little town of Mt. Kisco, NY. Hi may have to to write it myself.