About the Book
A scrappy young skateboarder's story of underground worlds and fringe existences, confusing family relationships and the struggle for intimacy.
"Tara Jepsen's Like a Dog is outrageously funny and soul-scrapingly grim, in the tradition of our most intrepid, shameless, and shame-filled comedians and storytellers. It also announces a singular new voice in American fiction-one which is deeply alive, hard-hitting, and tender."-Maggie Nelson, author of The Argonauts
A skateboarder in her early thirties, Paloma is aimlessly winging it through life. She takes low-paying jobs, drinks neon-colored wine coolers in the park, and drives to the Central Valley to skate the empty swimming pools dotting the sun-blasted landscape.
Paloma struggles to have a relationship with her brother Peter, whose opiate addiction makes that nearly impossible. Her own delusions about the nature of addiction help to keep the threat of Peter's death by overdose at a comfortable enough distance, and as he slides into a dangerous spiral, Paloma tries out the world of stand-up comedy, happier than she's ever been.
Praise for Like a Dog:
"This book beat the crap out of me. I am bruised and laughing. Thank you Tara Jepsen, may I have another?"-Daniel Handler, author of All The Dirty Parts
"Tara Jepsen captures the absurd, animal humor of residing in a human female body on planet Earth like no other, and Like a Dog sets it loose within a hazy California underground of abandoned skate pools, weed farms and comedy open mics. Eccentric and insidery, taking on the bonds of family and addiction, the effort to find a life and the drive to end it, Like a Dog brims with hyper-conscious gems of hilarity and pathos."-Michelle Tea, author of Black Wave
"Tara Jepsen's blunt eloquence takes us deep into the difficulty of our desires, where the things we most want-intimacy, realness, safety, guarantees-are the things we are the least likely to get. In the desolate hardscapes and nowheres of California, north and south, she reveals how closeness can still be alienating: a brutal fact of her stark realism that brings both laughter and tears."-Karen Tongson, author of Relocations: Queer Suburban Imaginaries
"How can this be Tara Jepsen's first book? Her inimitable voice has been a beloved part of the underground art scene for years-in comedy, performance, and personal essays. With her fiction debut, she turns all her pathos and humor on her protagonist Paloma as she explores the eternal pursuit for love and meaning among and between humans. Jepsen's specialty is the off-kilter observation or indignant proclamation that hits you in the funny bone and then resonates with real soul. I loved this book. I'm ecstatic she could lasso her eccentric and significant cosmology and weave it into this beautiful story."-Beth Lisick, author of Yokohama Threeway and Other Stories, co-founder of the Porchlight Storytelling Series
About the Author :
Tara Jepsen is a writer and actor living in Los Angeles, California. She's appeared in Emmy-winning series Transparent. She and longtime collaborator Beth Lisick created, wrote and acted in original web series Rods and Cones, released by Jill Soloway and Rebecca Odes's Wifey.tv in September 2014, named one of Indiewire's 25 Best Series/Creators of 2014. Tara has written and performed original sketch comedy with Lisick throughout the U.S. since 1999. They have appeared at Dixon Place in NYC, at San Francisco's Sketchfest, at the UCB in Los Angeles, and myriad additional venues. Jepsen has been published by The Believer, xojane.com, and SF Weekly, among others. She has toured and performed extensively with the seminal queer cabaret Sister Spit since 1997. And, she co-hosted the legendary San Francisco open mic K'vetsh at a gay men's bath house for over ten years.
Review :
"Jepsen's emotional, challenging first novel focuses on family and addiction. ... Though the tone and themes are heavy, there's a sardonic humor and queer vitality to balance the bleakness. This is a difficult but urgent novel about the costs of dependency and the ways people obscure what they don't want to see."--Publishers Weekly
"Jepsen's first outing is filled with razor-sharp observations about this generation's ennui and the myriad ways people screw up their lives, and she vividly evokes the vast stretches of California that lie between the major metropolises of Los Angeles and San Francisco."--Booklist
"Don't miss [Tara Jepsen's] accomplished debut novel, Like a Dog, about a free-sprit Cali skateboarder, Paloma, who adores her hard-to-love addict brother, Peter, a 'beautiful dude' with 'long hair in a wild golden snarl around his head."--ELLE Magazine
"Jepsen proves herself a master of fusing humor and tragedy as she takes us on a psychological road trip through California's suburban wastelands, its cities of hope, and rural cash crop operations, mixing no less than legal skateboarding adventures, fierce, quirky desire, and tragic loss into a powerful and familiar coming of age story."--Beth Stephens, artist and filmmaker
"Tara's stories about sibling love, the struggle of drug addiction, and the bonding power of skateboard culture, will break reader's hearts wide open. So detailed and real, it's like being there. This book captures the gritty, feisty spirit of Sister Spit at its best."--Annie Sprinkle, author of Hardcore from the Heart
"Tara Jepsen's protagonist is a frenetic pinball in a machine of hilarity, recklessness, and existential ennui. Mining the MTV generation's legacy of self-doubt, substance abuse, and unappeasable search for meaning, Jepsen excavates a queer feminist parable of survival that is simultaneously bombastic and completely peaceful at its core."--Zackary Drucker, artist, producer for Transparent
"[Like a Dog] contains some brilliantly casual radical feminism along with its rising action and denouement, and it tells a familiar story in ways that feel fresh and new but not contrived ... wisdom so sharp, it stings."--BUST Magazine
"Jepsen is a master, racing through the story at top speed."--Lambda Literary Review
"Like a Dog asks us to see the world through our first line of defense--our own bodies--and reconcile how all our choices and decisions, physical and mental, eventually reveal their scars. With short, quick, frequently hilarious prose, Jepsen mimics the rhythms of taking in the world physically and weaves it all together into a much larger, and more complex, mental picture. . . . Like a Dog is a welcome addition to the world of fiction, one told with equal parts awe in the face of life's challenges and comfort in its embraces, a riotous yelp into the deep end after a frontside carve over the death box."--Adam Abada, Monster Children
