Double Teenage

A Globe and Mail Best Book of 2016

Double Teenage tells the story of Celine and Julie, two girls coming of age in the 1990s in a desert town close to the US-Mexico border. Starting from their shared love of theatre, the girls move into a wider world that shimmers with intellectual and artistic possibility, but at the same time, is dense with threat.

This unrelenting novel shines a spotlight on paradoxes of Western culture. It asks impossible questions about the media’s obsession with sexual violence as it twins with a social unwillingness to look at real pain. It asks what it feels like to be a girl, simultaneously a being and a thing, feeling in a marketplace. Wherever they are--whether in a dance club in El Paso or an art lecture in Vancouver--these characters brush against maddening contradiction and concealed brutality.

This is a portrait of the recent past, seen through the cloudy lens of now. Murphy traces the lives of friends struggling within self-destructive realities. Part bildungsroman, part performance, part passionate essay, part magic spell, Double Teenage ultimately offers a way to see through violence into an emotionally alive place beyond the myriad traps of girlhood.

Joni Murphy is a writer and artist originally from Las Cruces, New Mexico. Since leaving the desert she has moved between artistic communities in Canada, the U.S. and Europe, studying and making stories, sound works, performance, and theories while holding down various low wage jobs. She survives for the time being in New York. jonimurphy.com offers a window.