"Gore's magic-infused narrative. . . .is a moving account of a young writer and mother striving to claim her own agency and find her voice." —Publishers Weekly
"This book mimics the messy, discursive texture of memory—of life. . . . Inventive and affecting." —Kirkus Reviews
"A scathing indictment of a system that works again people who are poor and female as well as a piercing and wise look at one woman's struggle to overcome it." —Booklist
"Told with whimsy and dignity. . . . This “memoirist’s novel” is a beguiling mash-up of feminist quotations, literary critique, real life predicaments, and plenty of magic." —The Riveter
"Gore tells her story with such verve and wit I missed my train stop reading it." —Lambda Literary Review
"Ariel. . . .calculates and acts impulsively and makes strange and strong choices. And we are right there with her." —Santa Fe Reporter
"A re-writing of every helpless princess fairy tale and a reclamation of every Scarlet Letter. . . .We Were Witches is an absolute must read." —Ms. magazine blog
“The voice of this book is striking. It’s authoritative, incantatory, and yet also naïve, in the sense that it lets the reader experience events with the immediacy the young protagonist does.” —The Rumpus
“We Were Witches is a novel that reads more like a magic spell/memoir/memory/body…it is everything you didn’t know you were allowed to want in a narrative.” —Autostraddle
"Like a talisman, Gore’s prose works its magic with authoritative subtlety. Reading it will leave you changed for the better." — Signature Reads
“Ariel Gore’s We Were Witches is one woman’s body refusing to become property, refusing to be overwritten by law or traditions, one woman’s body cutting open a hole in culture so that actual bodies might emerge. A triumphant body story. A singularly spectacular siren song.” —Lidia Yuknavitch, author of The Small Backs of Children
“We Were Witches seizes the shame and hurt internalized by young women and turns it into magic art and poetry. Ariel Gore’s writing is a diamond pentacle carved into a living heart, transforming singular experience into universal knowledge.” —Susie Bright, author of Big Sex Little Death
“Forget Freytag's Pyramid (of Predictable Male Prose)—behold Gore’s Upside Down Triangle (of Fierce Feminist Narrative)! Drawing from myth, fairy tale, the wisdom of third wave literary icons, and the singular experiences of a queer single mama artist trying to survive the nineties, We Were Witches is its own genre, in its own canon. It moves with punk rock grace and confidence, and I totally loved it.” —Kate Schatz, author of Rad American Women A-Z
“We Were Witches is raw and truthful, painfully funny, inspiring of outrage, and alive with the wonder and magic of a feminist awakening. One single mom becoming woke, struggling, and triumphing on her own outsider terms, We Were Witches is a new feminist classic, penned by one the culture’s strongest authors at her most experimental and personal.” —Michelle Tea, author of Black Wave
“Ariel Gore’s We Were Witches is both magical and punk rock—the way it takes traditional values and traditional story structure to task, the way Gore’s protagonist, Ariel, uses witchy intelligence to resist a system totally against her.” —Michelle Cruz Gonzales, author of The Spitboy Rule
2017-06-06
Dispatches from the life of a teen mom and budding feminist from the author of The End of Eve (2014) and Bluebird (2010)."Write what you know, my women's lit professor kept saying, but what I knew wasn't shaped like a story and now I was a sophomore and I needed to write an underground feminist classic." The protagonist, Ariel Gore, is a young woman trying to care for her baby and go to college while battling against poverty, male violence, her mother's disappointment, and the idea that there is only one way to tell a story. In the short vignettes collected here, she describes childbirth, romantic disappointment, disordered eating, and artistic frustration. Ariel reads Audre Lorde to her baby and casts spells to protect their rented house from ghosts and hateful neighbors. There is no plot as such, and the only connective tissue linking these scenes is Ariel's singular voice, by turns sardonic and vulnerable. The author has published memoirs already, and the decision to present stories featuring a protagonist with her own name and a recognizably similar biography as "a novel" is a provocative one. Certainly, it provides formal cover for some of the narrative's more fantastic moments, such as when a blackbird gives Ariel a secret message and when her mother's best friend turns into a possum and scurries from the kitchen into the backyard. The shape of the text, too, presents a challenge: it's a concrete refutation of the idea that all stories should have the same outline. This book mimics the messy, discursive texture of memory—of life. At the same time, Gore's insistence that Ariel is not her makes perfect sense in a book about the construction of an identity. In choosing novel over memoir, Gore is asserting that she is giving us her art, not her self. The themes Gore explores here are not new for her—in addition to writing fiction and autobiography, she was the founding editor of the parenting zine Hip Mama—but the craft and passion she brings to these topics make her second novel a welcome addition to her oeuvre. Inventive and affecting.
