Naked in the Promised Land: A Memoir

This modern classic of LGBT writing includes an introduction from Carmen Maria Machado, author of Her Body and Other Parties, and a new afterword from Lillian Faderman. Born in 1940, Lillian Faderman is the only child of an uneducated and unmarried Jewish woman who left Latvia to seek a better life in America. Lillian grew up in poverty, but fantasised about becoming an actress. When her dreams led to the dangerous, seductive world of the sex trade and sham-marriages in Hollywood of the fifties, she realised she was attracted to women, and that show-biz is as cruel as they say.Desperately seeking to make her life meaningful, she studied at Berkeley; paying her way by working as a pin-up model and burlesque dancer, hiding her lesbian affairs from the outside world. At last she became a brilliant student and the woman who becomes a loving partner, a devoted mother, an acclaimed writer and ground-breaking pioneer of gay and lesbian scholarship.Told with wrenching immediacy and great power, Naked in the Promised Land is the story of an exceptional woman and her remarkable, unorthodox life.