It's ironic that this was a Bisexual Book Award finalist: not because the book is undeserving, but because Valerie Solanas refused and repudiated every available label. I can't help but feel she'd sneer at that award title as well.

That's what this biography does an excellent job of illuminating, that there's much more to Solanas than the day she shot Andy Warhol (fifteen minutes of fame?). By focusing on Solanas' writing and her own interpretations of her work, Fahs shows that Solanas was a witty, complex, and progressive thinker who was defying norms far more than many of her more-famous 1960s contemporaries.

Fahs has a tremendous job in that she has to not just dispel the idea that all Solanas ever did was write a very strange tract and fire a gun; she also has had to search extremely patchy and scant resources to find the missing materials to fill in all the gaps. She succeeds, and what emerges is not a caricature of a man-hater but a moving picture of someone who spoke and wrote in ways that were so far advanced that people simply mistook (and continue to mistake) her often oblique meaning(s). As a critical biographer, Fahs excels at close readings of her subject and the words that remain on record, spoken and in text. She unravels the Solanas legend and spins a story that is far more complex than the circulating legends.

In fact, when she does fall short, it is when she tries to box Solanas in or pin her down as something in particular, even if it's something positive, like a particular kind of revolutionary thinker. It must be tempting to label your subject as being at the vanguard of X thinking or theory, but critical readings of Solanas' own work defy any such categorization (and Fahs' own thesis essentially contradicts this line of thinking).

Recommended for those interested in radical 60s feminism (or feminism in general), queer theory, things Factory-related, or women who will not put up and shut up. ( )