In Search of Pure Lust

By Lise Weil

In Search of Pure Lust documents an important chapter in lesbian history that is already being distorted and erased, a time when lesbians were reinventing everything from the ground up. Along with violence against women around the globe, lesbians of the 1970s and ’80s were motivated by growing militarism, rampant development, species loss, and living systems in decline. For many, this was the logical conclusion to a state of law/mind/rule that had prevailed for thousands of years — patriarchy.

This is a long overdue and unvarnished insider’s account of those times. The memoir, centered in the Northeast U.S. and then later in Quebec, combines a personal story with the story of a political movement. The book is full of celebration, but also depicts the shadow side of the lesbian movement, taking the reader into the bitter squabbles that divided women, both personally and politically. On a deeper level, the memoir charts a long and difficult quest for love. Over and over, the narrator dives headlong into rapturous passions that either fizzle out or come to brutal and ugly endings.

In the mid-’80s, when a friend invites her to a Zen retreat, she as desperate enough to say yes. A period of difficult self-examination ensues and, over a period of years, she begins to learn an altogether different approach to desire. The last section of the memoir traces the fallout from that collision between hot-blooded lesbian desire and spacious, temperate Zen mind. What the search for pure lust uncovers, in the end, is something that looks a lot like love.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Inanna Publications
• Release date: Apr 5, 2018
• ISBN: 9781771335003

Lise Weil

Lise Weil founded Trivia: A Journal of Ideas, an award-winning radical feminist literary and political magazine, in 1982, which she edited for nine years. She was also editor of its online relaunch, Trivia: Voices of Feminism, from 2004 to 2011. In 1990 she translated German writer Christina Thurner-Rohr’s collection of essays Vagabonding: Feminist Thinking Cut Loose (Vagabundinnen), which was published by Beacon Press, and founded the online journal Dark Matter: Women Witnessing in 2014. Weil’s short fiction, essays, reviews, literary nonfiction, and translations have been published widely in journals in both Canada and the US. Her collection of Mary Meigs’s writings on aging, Beyond Recall (2005), was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award in biography in 2006. Weil teaches in the Individualized Master’s program in Goddard College’s Graduate Institute. She lives in Montreal and spends summers in a cabin in the woods north of the city, where she hosts annual retreats for women writers centered around dreamwork.

Book preview