Identity issues fuel sexy, sapphic romp

A TRIO OF WOMEN, TWO OF WHOM SHARE THE SAME NAME, CONNECT AND CLASH IN MARISSA HIGGINS' COMIC TALE

- MEREDITH MARAN

IN 1984, at age 33, I fell in love with a woman for the first time. Her name was Cathy. Her previous girlfriend’s name was also Cathy. “Wasn't that confusing, sharing a name with your girlfriend?” I asked. She shrugged. “Everything about being a lesbian is confusing at first,” she said. “You get used to it.” In “Sweetener,” Marissa Higgins’ sexy, poignant second sapphic novel, the reader is served plenty of confusion, lesbian-related and otherwise. For starters, two of the book's three protagonists, who are breaking up as we meet them, are both named Rebecca. With 18,993 girls’ names in active use in contemporary America, why would Higgins build this disconcerting element into “Sweetener’s” structure? It proves to be a decision well-made. As the reader turns the pages, learning to individuate the two Rebeccas (whose central struggle is learning to individuate from each other) gives us bonus information about, and empathy for, both of them. “My wife and I have the same first name, though our friends never used mine; I've always been Rebecca's wife,” Rebecca No. 1 says of Rebecca No. 2—No. 2 being the more powerful one, since she’s the one initiating the breakup. “Our last names, too, are still the same, as I took hers at our court wedding,” No. 1 tells us. “With the same name, it’s easy to become one person instead of two.”