| Ice and Fire | Andrea Dworkin | HarperCollins | 1987 |
From Publishers Weekly: In Ice and Fire, the unnamed narrator, writing in the first person, begins her story in Camden, N.J., where boys who play the most popular street game ‘witch’ try to catch, cage and string up a little girl. The scene shifts to a New England college, the setting for a platonic affair with a woman friend and a sexual one, resulting in pregnancy and abortion, with a man. In the ’60s, she leads a ragged existence of a mixture of indiscriminate sex and drugs, poverty, hunger, humiliation and fear on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, before fleeing to European hippiedom and marriage to a man who brutalizes her. Back in New York, she writes to redeem herself, only to find that the one editor who wants her book insists on her body and soul too. This is not an easy novel to read, but is an interesting and provocative one.