Kissing Girls on Shabbat: A Memoir

Psychotherapist Glass debuts with a searing account of coming to terms with her homosexuality as an ultra-Orthodox Jew. At 19, Glass was teaching at a religious girl’s school in Brooklyn’s Borough Park neighborhood when she met and fell in love with Dassa. The pressures of secrecy snuffed out the women’s brief romance, and Glass entered an arranged marriage with a man named Yossi in the early 2000s. The couple had two children, but Glass felt increasingly frustrated by their lack of passion, and she eventually left Yossi when he refused to let her pursue a PhD in social work. She enrolled in a graduate program, married another man, and carefully maintained her strict Hasidic community’s rituals of observance so she could keep seeing her children. After obtaining her degree, Glass finally came out of the closet, divorced her second husband, and moved to Manhattan with her children. She suffuses the narrative with astonishing empathy for the people and forces that stood between her and liberation, and few readers will be unmoved by the depth of her struggle or the strength of her resistance. This leaves a mark. Agent: Harvey Klinger, Harvey Klinger Literary. (June)