How does this come to be? What psychodynamic processes transpire as I, a lesbian woman reader, identify with a gay male character and with the straight woman who has created him, and what results from this triadic mental coupling? I identify with both Walter and Jane, and I imagine the three of us forming a unit in which we participate in and partake of one another. We three come together in my mind by way of my identificatory reading process. The author is an exceptionally fine writer and an heterosexual woman her protagonist, Walter McCloud, failed ballet dancer and high school English teacher, is a gay man I, the reader, am an English professor, a student of ballet, and a lesbian woman. Reading Jane Hamilton's wonderful 1998 novel, The Short History of a Prince, I became a member of a fascinating ménage à trois. "Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo." Photograph by Dana Lixenberg.
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