The girl in this story had more agency and voice than any girl I’d ever read or would read in my entire life.” —Lydia Yuknavitch, national bestselling author of Thrust

The book opens with a dialogue that seems to be taken from a French Nouvelle Vague film: a ten (!) year old child named Janey is dumped by her father, who is also her fiancé (yep).The guy can't stand the pressure of a long-term relationship, he needs his space and Janey is preventing him from being himself. By the way, she also suffers from pelvic inflammatory desease, guess why. Among the Mayan ruins of Merida, a disquiting landscape of unintelligible architecture and nature, they go through silences, sex, jealousy, sex, nostalgic memories, sex, incommunicabilty. They both know the romance is over. this is sure a sore one to read, but i think anyone with an interest in the times (1977) should read, or force themselves to read it! it is patchy, some of it doesn't work, the opening sequences are very unsettling, it doesn't flow well, but isn't that just like punk? an exercise in juvenile and moderately pointless self indulgence with a little bit of crap porn thrown in. So this is story about Janey, a ten-yea-old girl, half-orphan, living with her father who to her is "boyfriend, brother, sister, money, amusement, and father" - and we might add sexual partner. First he rapes her, then she willingly has sex with him because it makes her feel loved. She is suffering from pelvic inflammatory disease, has her first abortion with 13, her second one a month later. Her father sends her to New York City, where apparrently she lives on her own, joins a gang and later is kidnapped, held captive and taught how to be a prostitute. At the age of 14 she gets cancer and dies.She knew her book wouldn't be banned, censored, burnt on the stake... quite the contrary. It would sell pretty well and its devastating power would be tamed by commercial success and intellectual indifference. Most people are what they sense and if all you see day after day is a mat on a floor that belongs to the rats and four walls with tiny piles of plaster at the bottom, and all you eat is starch, and all you hear is continuous noise, you smell garbage and piss which drips through the walls continually, and all the people you know live like you, it's not horrible, it's just . . .Who they are." Yes, noted scholars, authors and critics who form the all seeing literary eye that is the 1001 books list, "Why do you hate people who read books? And why do you want to punish them so?" I know the list is supposed to represent many novels, genres and styles not for their likeability but for their uniqueness and their gift to literature and the world at large, but come on. Blood and Guts in High School? Really? Yougottabekiddinme!

In one of the most complex parts of the book, Janey identifies herself with Hester Prynne, the protagonist of Hawthorne's "The Scarlet Letter": a victim of the old puritanism morphs into a victim of our cold, nihilist world. Again I turn to the creators and compilers of the 1001 books to read before you die list and ask, "Why?" Seriously, what's this supposed to be? I love a good anti-novel as much as the next pretentious hipster, but don't just slap together a bunch of stuff and then bore me to death with it.

The Persian dwarf and Slave Trader (a crossing between Twin Peaks and Pierre Guyotat) is the grotesque spokesman of the author's viewpoint with regard to culture and art, seen as the only way out for mankind. In his own words:

Now, if you're still reading, please let me point out a few more things that seem to be conveniently overlooked by most 'serious' reviewers (though I wonder whether they've actually read the novel before trashing it). I don’t think I have anything original to add that hasn’t already been dissected and found by every sapphic or queer on the internet. But like, But I’m a Cheerleader, Jennifer’s Body, D.E.B.S.. I would love to offer sapphic movies that have real intimacy and love in them that actually are between women or AFAB characters but there aren’t a ton in the teen genre. If I had to grasp at straws, I would look towards the late 1990s in terms of the bad girls doing bad things like in Jawbreaker or Sugar and Spice . Over all I needed to know what happened Janey. My boyfriend looked over my shoulder quite a few times while I was reading and thought the pictures were "interesting." If someone has a logical point to make it does not necessarily have to be laden with a metaphysical analogy to be compelling. Capitalism is not like a man raping his daughter.

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While imprisoned by Linker, she rewrites and writes about The Scarlet Letter and compares her situation to that of Hester Prynne, particularly as regards how badly women are treated if they step out of the male-imposed limits, leading to self-hatred. She also learns Persian and writes Persian poems, which are essentially phrases from a language learning book and basic phrases relating to her current life ( Is there any fate? Yes, Mrs., your fate is better than Janey’s.) From Persian she moves to Propertius, whom we have already met in Great Expectations. Again, his poems are rewritten to suit her needs. For all of the ways that this intersects with critical theory, the theorisation of women's writing (think Cixous' écriture féminine, Irigaray, Kristeva) and Lacanian psychoanalysis, it's also dirty and grubby and revelling in its own gleeful rebelliousness and subversive energy.

Right now I can speak as directly as I want 'cause no one gives a shit about writing and ideas, all anyone cares about is money."

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In this way, Blood and Guts in High School can be read as an almost near-perfect embodiment of Jacques Derrida’s deconstructionist paradox. Deconstruction, to put it very briefly in relevance here, for Derrida involves questioning the origins of dominance in any given system to reveal the power and oppression inherent to its structure. The paradox inherent is that all attempts at deconstruction inevitably reproduce the system they break down. Janey falls prey to this paradox time and again, and this is most clear through the mistranslations of “The Persian Poems.” Even when learning and deconstructing a linguistic system external to her own, Janey remains governed by the structures of language and sex that dominate her. The mistranslations may afford Janey an illusion of freedom, a method of creating her own system, but left simply in the written word and contained in language, her freedom falls prey to the deconstructionist paradox of never truly escaping the systems she critiques. You think it's enough? Nope. Unfortunately, Janey has cancer. When she realises that her beloved Slave Trader is going to leave her, she escapes to Tangier, the Moroccan haven for Beatniks, artists and junkies, where she meets Jean Genet. The strange couple sets off on a hallucinatory journey to Egypt in search of an ancient book that teaches how men can change their nature and become... well, something else. Doves, alligators, souls, who knows. Whatever it is, it's better than what we are now. No, I wish I was that cool. No one around me was on Tumblr. I just missed it. It never got popular in my weird friend group in Toronto. So I wrote a film blog literally mostly for myself and no one else. If you weren’t holed up on Tumblr, what were you like in high school then?