Woman Determined

""If you want to know what really happened, you ask someone who was there, just like you are doing with me, right?"" Swallow replicates the methods of journalism and oral history in this disturbing, posthumously published novel about shifting perceptions. At its outset, Margaret Donovan, founder and former director of a women's health center, is being interviewed for an article about women who've made a difference in Seattle's lesbian community. But the unnamed interviewer quickly takes a back seat to the novel's two narrators: the staunch and hearty Donovan and her attorney, Laura Gilbert, who represents Donovan after she's injured in a car accident. The accident comes at a turning point for both women--Donovan's clinic is in financial peril, and Gilbert is undergoing a crisis of faith about her law practice. Did Donovan mismanage clinic funds? Who was at fault in the accident? Did Donovan resign, or was she forced out of her job at the clinic? In alternating monologues, both women tell the truth as they see it, and make the ""interview"" a platform from which to address larger issues of justice and personal responsibility. ""I needed the ambiguities of real people,"" says Gilbert. It is precisely these ambiguities that Swallow (Leave a Light On for Me) portrays. Readers looking for the ""real"" truth will be disappointed: Swallow tries hard to give her paired, conflicting narratives equal weight as their complex, forthright tellers do their best to recount and make meaning from the past they share. (Oct.)