Enter your email Address

ENTROPY
  • About
    • About
    • Masthead
    • Advertising
    • Submission Guidelines
    • Info on Book Reviews
  • Essays
    • All Introspection
      Creative Nonfiction / Essay

      Echoes of Infertility and Stifled Grief

      April 20, 2021

      Creative Nonfiction / Essay

      The Birds: Lost and Found

      April 14, 2021

      Creative Nonfiction / Essay

      The Birds: Elegy for a Tree

      April 12, 2021

      Creative Nonfiction / Essay

      Coursing

      April 9, 2021

      Introspection

      The Birds: Little Bird

      April 1, 2021

      Introspection

      Variations on a Theme: Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band

      March 23, 2021

      Introspection

      Variations on a Theme: Finding My Voice

      March 9, 2021

      Introspection

      Variations on a Theme: Individuation

      February 27, 2021

  • Fiction
    • Fiction

      The Birds: 24 Hour Relief

      April 21, 2021

      Fiction

      BLACKCACKLE: Fragment One

      April 14, 2021

      Fiction

      The Birds: To Fly Among the Birds

      April 9, 2021

      Fiction

      The Birds: Another Red Ribbon – a nonbinary tale of absented love

      April 5, 2021

      Fiction

      Survivor’s Club

      March 24, 2021

  • Reviews
    • All Collaborative Review Video Review
      Review

      A Cure for Loneliness: Review of Monica Fambrough’s Softcover

      April 21, 2021

      Review

      an Orphic escape-hatch from the Hades of Literalization — Review of John Olson’s Dada Budapest

      April 19, 2021

      Review

      Claiming Space in Muriel Leung’s “Imagine Us, The Swarm”

      April 15, 2021

      Review

      Review: Milk Blood Heat by Dantiel W. Moniz

      April 12, 2021

      Collaborative Review

      Attention to the Real: A Conversation

      September 3, 2020

      Collaborative Review

      A Street Car Named Whatever

      February 22, 2016

      Collaborative Review

      Black Gum: A Conversational Review

      August 7, 2015

      Collaborative Review

      Lords of Waterdeep in Conversation

      February 25, 2015

      Video Review

      Entropy’s Super Mario Level

      September 15, 2015

      Video Review

      Flash Portraits of Link: Part 7 – In Weakness, Find Strength

      January 2, 2015

      Video Review

      Basal Ganglia by Matthew Revert

      March 31, 2014

      Video Review

      The Desert Places by Amber Sparks and Robert Kloss, Illustrated by Matt Kish

      March 21, 2014

  • Small Press
    • Small Press

      F*%K IF I KNOW//BOOKS

      April 13, 2021

      Small Press

      Tolsun Books

      March 16, 2021

      Small Press

      Inside the Castle

      March 9, 2021

      Small Press

      OOMPH! Press

      February 24, 2021

      Small Press

      Dynamo Verlag

      February 17, 2021

  • Where to Submit
  • More
    • Poetry
    • Interviews
    • Games
      • All Board Games Video Games
        Creative Nonfiction / Essay

        HOW VIDEO GAMES MADE ME BIOPHILIC

        February 12, 2021

        Creative Nonfiction / Essay

        How Zelda Saved Me: The Inspiration, Feminism, and Empowerment of Hyrule

        November 2, 2020

        Board Games

        Session Report: Victoriana and Optimism

        December 14, 2019

        Games

        Best of 2019: Video Games

        December 13, 2019

        Board Games

        Session Report: Victoriana and Optimism

        December 14, 2019

        Board Games

        Ludic Writing: Lady of the West

        July 27, 2019

        Board Games

        Session Report: Paperback and Anomia

        July 27, 2019

        Board Games

        Ludic Writing: The Real Leeds Part 12 (Once in a Lifetime)

        November 10, 2018

        Video Games

        HOW VIDEO GAMES MADE ME BIOPHILIC

        February 12, 2021

        Video Games

        How Zelda Saved Me: The Inspiration, Feminism, and Empowerment of Hyrule

        November 2, 2020

        Video Games

        Best of 2019: Video Games

        December 13, 2019

        Video Games

        Super Smash Bros. Ultimate is the Spirit of Generosity

        December 31, 2018

    • Food
    • Small Press Releases
    • Film
    • Music
    • Paranormal
    • Travel
    • Art
    • Graphic Novels
    • Comics
    • Current Events
    • Astrology
    • Random
  • RESOURCES
  • The Accomplices
    • THE ACCOMPLICES
    • Enclave
    • Trumpwatch

ENTROPY

  • About
    • About
    • Masthead
    • Advertising
    • Submission Guidelines
    • Info on Book Reviews
  • Essays
    • All Introspection
      Creative Nonfiction / Essay

      Echoes of Infertility and Stifled Grief

      April 20, 2021

      Creative Nonfiction / Essay

      The Birds: Lost and Found

      April 14, 2021

      Creative Nonfiction / Essay

      The Birds: Elegy for a Tree

      April 12, 2021

      Creative Nonfiction / Essay

      Coursing

      April 9, 2021

      Introspection

      The Birds: Little Bird

      April 1, 2021

      Introspection

      Variations on a Theme: Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band

      March 23, 2021

      Introspection

      Variations on a Theme: Finding My Voice

      March 9, 2021

      Introspection

      Variations on a Theme: Individuation

      February 27, 2021

  • Fiction
    • Fiction

      The Birds: 24 Hour Relief

      April 21, 2021

      Fiction

      BLACKCACKLE: Fragment One

      April 14, 2021

      Fiction

      The Birds: To Fly Among the Birds

      April 9, 2021

      Fiction

      The Birds: Another Red Ribbon – a nonbinary tale of absented love

      April 5, 2021

      Fiction

      Survivor’s Club

      March 24, 2021

  • Reviews
    • All Collaborative Review Video Review
      Review

      A Cure for Loneliness: Review of Monica Fambrough’s Softcover

      April 21, 2021

      Review

      an Orphic escape-hatch from the Hades of Literalization — Review of John Olson’s Dada Budapest

      April 19, 2021

      Review

      Claiming Space in Muriel Leung’s “Imagine Us, The Swarm”

      April 15, 2021

      Review

      Review: Milk Blood Heat by Dantiel W. Moniz

      April 12, 2021

      Collaborative Review

      Attention to the Real: A Conversation

      September 3, 2020

      Collaborative Review

      A Street Car Named Whatever

      February 22, 2016

      Collaborative Review

      Black Gum: A Conversational Review

      August 7, 2015

      Collaborative Review

      Lords of Waterdeep in Conversation

      February 25, 2015

      Video Review

      Entropy’s Super Mario Level

      September 15, 2015

      Video Review

      Flash Portraits of Link: Part 7 – In Weakness, Find Strength

      January 2, 2015

      Video Review

      Basal Ganglia by Matthew Revert

      March 31, 2014

      Video Review

      The Desert Places by Amber Sparks and Robert Kloss, Illustrated by Matt Kish

      March 21, 2014

  • Small Press
    • Small Press

      F*%K IF I KNOW//BOOKS

      April 13, 2021

      Small Press

      Tolsun Books

      March 16, 2021

      Small Press

      Inside the Castle

      March 9, 2021

      Small Press

      OOMPH! Press

      February 24, 2021

      Small Press

      Dynamo Verlag

      February 17, 2021

  • Where to Submit
  • More
    • Poetry
    • Interviews
    • Games
      • All Board Games Video Games
        Creative Nonfiction / Essay

        HOW VIDEO GAMES MADE ME BIOPHILIC

        February 12, 2021

        Creative Nonfiction / Essay

        How Zelda Saved Me: The Inspiration, Feminism, and Empowerment of Hyrule

        November 2, 2020

        Board Games

        Session Report: Victoriana and Optimism

        December 14, 2019

        Games

        Best of 2019: Video Games

        December 13, 2019

        Board Games

        Session Report: Victoriana and Optimism

        December 14, 2019

        Board Games

        Ludic Writing: Lady of the West

        July 27, 2019

        Board Games

        Session Report: Paperback and Anomia

        July 27, 2019

        Board Games

        Ludic Writing: The Real Leeds Part 12 (Once in a Lifetime)

        November 10, 2018

        Video Games

        HOW VIDEO GAMES MADE ME BIOPHILIC

        February 12, 2021

        Video Games

        How Zelda Saved Me: The Inspiration, Feminism, and Empowerment of Hyrule

        November 2, 2020

        Video Games

        Best of 2019: Video Games

        December 13, 2019

        Video Games

        Super Smash Bros. Ultimate is the Spirit of Generosity

        December 31, 2018

    • Food
    • Small Press Releases
    • Film
    • Music
    • Paranormal
    • Travel
    • Art
    • Graphic Novels
    • Comics
    • Current Events
    • Astrology
    • Random
  • RESOURCES
  • The Accomplices
    • THE ACCOMPLICES
    • Enclave
    • Trumpwatch
LiteratureReview

Doll Palace by Sara Lippmann

written by Meg Tuite December 17, 2015

Doll Palace by Sara Lippmann
Dock Street Press, 2014
258 pages – Dock Street / Amazon

 

Lippmann is a rare phenomenon. Her short story collection, Doll Palace (Dock Street Press), is 23 stories that deliver a masterful, lethal microcosm/macrocosm of inhabiting these awkward bodies we grapple around in. Sibling and parental protection/embarrassment, the strange shelter and regrets of sex, marriage, kids, abortion, and ceaseless encounters that perpetually cling to the amalgam of memories. We sculpt our isolated realities through societal cavities forced or throw upon us.

To call this a debut collection is to do Lippmann a disservice. This is the work of a kinetic, powerful writer who has been haunting us since we first started reading unforgettable words that led us back to the muddy melodies and moonlit bends of our own histories. To read ourselves on the page is the work of an outsider, a listener, a habitual watcher of the ‘unsaid’ beneath the nostalgia and construction of the necessary facades we put up to survive.

The beauty of love and sex:

“There were no washboard comments or termite tits.”

“We were wasted yet he checked me like a holiday turkey.”

“When Mark Pith kissed me in junior high I didn’t brush my teeth for a week even though we’d been shut in a closet at random and his jaw hung loose from wine coolers as if it’d been shot up with Novocain.”

Survival:

“Hardcover releases beckoned grand baggy arms while indie paperbacks huddled on side tables like the homeless around a burning can.”

“She was always feeling ‘vaguely suicidal.’ Name a woman who feels different.”

Marriage, children, secrets, old boyfriends who resurface:

“Hard to believe, at first, but true: marriage lent new depth to solitude.”

“He glances at Steffi but sees only her mouth, a tunnel, dark pink like the ventricle to the model heart at the Franklin Institute they once hid inside on a school trip, her tumbler tilting toward it.”

“His voice low, his body looming over mine like I’m a bug he could squash, the heat rising off of him, ready, like some boomerang pheromone shot into the air because the universe is like that.”

These quotes are glimpses caught by flashlights in the loose spheres of the many lives within ‘a lifetime’. Oh, the glory of black-outs. Clorox won’t even exhume these muted tappings against the synapses of places we don’t want to go when we walk away from dust-ridden, cobwebbed sex and blurry fields of ‘I don’t remember that’. Yet when Lippmann takes us there we rediscover the theater of our lives and don’t need to overshadow the sundial of a planetary girdle of suppression with kids and generic yearbook photos.

We are the high notes of back-up singers. We are the instruments: the whole goddamn orchestra. We are something, somewhere in time and the spotlight is parading over those places we might never have returned to alone. Lippmann is not only with us, but gives us the gift of getting back inside the awkward body sex marriage motley being of ourselves; the truth and hilarity of what it is to be human.

Doll Palace is woven so skillfully that the movements from one room to the next, one character’s inner dialogue to the next is fluid and non-linear like memory.

“The Best of Us,” starts out with the narrator at a spa called: Yogaversal. Her suite is a “long cold dorm with large windows and narrow beds for nine others, but it reminds me of the convent where I stayed in Murano during a backpack through Europe junior year. The only difference is this spruced up army cot costs $350 a night, happy 40th fucking birthday to me.” Lippmann continues:

The day we found out there was nothing wrong with me I cheated on Neil. On the drive back from University of Pittsburgh Medical Center the car smelled of latex and hand sanitizer as it couldn’t make up its mind between a hospital and a whorehouse.

When Neil approached with the resort pamphlet–Revolutionize your life! Experience your Ohm away from Home! Ignite your inner Goddess–waving it overhead like a flag of surrender I was in bed, tearing through celebrity weeklies for inspiration.

Lippmann moves us through backpacking at age 19, discovering a mole and the belief that it’s malignant, the fucked up media industry that has the narrator ready to plunge into plastic surgery, having an affair, and then a husband who talks her into going off to a silent retreat for her 40th birthday to an ashram. And within this multi-layered story of deceit and role-playing in the most absurd surroundings, the narrator turns hilarity into unexpected moments of inner recognition and the futility of duality. Doll Palace is never black and white. Lippmann writes:

Sometimes I wish I could be like her, feeling everything at once, the full spectrum right there on the surface. Every kiss, every fender bender, forgotten line in a school play, every insult from our mother, touch from our father, every exhilaration and humiliation, fingers slammed in lockers, stretching me out like a mouse in a trap, all of it.

Get ready to feel all of it. Not sitting in a back row with popcorn, but on screen in the midst of the disquiet of self through the prosaic, the naked, the stark and vivid landscape of those damn still days that don’t even give us the opportunity to turn away from ourselves and talk about the weather.

Lippmann may write about debutantes, but has never been a debut. Her work is timeless and unflinching. Don’t miss out! DAMN BRILLIANT!

Doll Palace by Sara Lippmann was last modified: December 4th, 2015 by Meg Tuite
Dock Street PressfictionSarah LippmannShort storiesShort Story Collection
0 comment
0
Facebook Twitter Google + Pinterest
Avatar
Meg Tuite

Meg Tuite is author of two short story collections, Bound By Blue (2013) Sententia Books and Domestic Apparition (2011) San Francisco Bay Press, and five chapbooks. She won the Twin Antlers Collaborative Poetry award from Artistically Declined Press for her poetry collection, Bare Bulbs Swinging (2014), written with Heather Fowler and Michelle Reale. She teaches at Santa Fe Community College, and is a columnist at Connotation Press and JMWW. Her blog: http://megtuite.com

previous post
Wednesday Entropy Roundup
next post
30 Years of Ghibli: A Retrospective

You may also like

This Week in Films #12: The Last Three Tom Hardy Films

March 25, 2015

Sand Opera by Philip Metres

January 14, 2016

Ugly Girls by Lindsay Hunter

March 22, 2015

The Word Kingdom in the Word Kingdom by Noah Eli Gordon

August 13, 2015
Facebook Twitter Instagram

Recent Comments

  • parri Loved the article. Beautifully captured..stay strong. Something must await for you at the end of this path..

    How Bodybuilding Ruined My Life ·  April 2, 2021

  • Waterlily Heartbreaking, real, and often so vivid. Parents, family, the pain and the damage we carry for them and from them. There is a black void where bits and pieces of our soul take leave to as we watch our...

    Descansos ·  April 2, 2021

  • Neo G I hsve to check this out! Is that doom on the cover!!

    Dskillz Harris & Chile_madd – The Next Episode ·  March 28, 2021

Featured Columns & Series

  • The Birds
  • Dinnerview
  • WOVEN
  • Variations on a Theme
  • BLACKCACKLE
  • COVID-19
  • Literacy Narrative
  • Mini-Syllabus
  • Their Days Are Numbered
  • On Weather
  • Disarticulations
  • The Waters
  • Session Report series
  • Birdwolf
  • Comics I've Been Geeking Out On
  • Small Press Releases
  • Books I Hate (and Also Some I Like)
  • The Poetics of Spaces
  • Tales From the End of the Bus Line
  • Fog or a Cloud
  • 30 Years of Ghibli
  • Cooking Origin Stories
  • Food and Covid-19
  • YOU MAKE ME FEEL
  • Ludic Writing
  • Best of 2019
  • The Talking Cure
  • Stars to Stories
  • DRAGONS ARE REAL OR THEY ARE DEAD
  • Foster Care
  • LEAKY CULTURE
  • Jem and the Holographic Feminisms
  • D&D with Entropy

Find Us On Facebook

Entropy
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Instagram

©2014-2021 The Accomplices LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Read our updated Privacy Policy.


Back To Top