Acts of Service by Lillian Fishman
Paperback published by Europa Editions 7th July 2022
ISBN 9781787703858
I had been going around for years trying to figure out what sex meant to other people. Eve has an adoring girlfriend, an impulsive streak, and a secret fear that she’s wasting her brief youth with just one person. So one evening she posts some nudes online. This is how she meets Olivia, and through Olivia, the charismatic Nathan. Despite Eve’s better instincts, the three soon begin a relationship one that disturbs Eve as much as it enthralls her.
As each act of their affair unfolds across a cold and glittering New York, Eve is forced to confront the question that most consume her what do we bring to sex? What does it reveal of ourselves, and each other? And how do we reconcile what we want with what we think we should want?
MY REVIEW
I can’t believe this well written story of Acts of Service, by Lillian Fisherman’s is her first novel. The story is about lesbian sexuality, with a mix of where Eve was becoming aware of her body and what she decides to do. The book of Acts of Service is great fiction where at fifteen, Eve, fell in love with a girl in her own town in Massachusetts. Eve has a girlfriend, Olivia, and then she meets the charismatic Nathan. If you love watching the new Gossip Girl TV Show, with sexuality weaved into the show, then you will love this book Acts of Service.
EXTRACT FROM PAGE 1,
PART 1 ATTENTION
I had hundred’s of nudes stored in my phone, but I’d never sent them to anyone. The shots themselves were fairly standard my faceless body floating in the bedrooms and bathroom mirrors. Whenever I took one I fell in love with it for a moment. Standing there naked and hunched over my little screen, I felt overwhelmed with the urge to show someone this new iteration of my body. But each photo seemed more private and impossible than the last.
You could see in them something beyond desire, harder and more humiliating. While I was brushing my teeth or stepping out of the shower I would see my own body and find myself overwhelmed with a sense of urgency and disuse. My body was crying out that I was not fulfilling my purpose. I was meant to have sex probably with some wild number of people. Maybe it was more savage than that, that I was meant not to fuck but to get fucked. The purpose of my life at large remained mysterious, but I had come round to the idea that my purpose as a body was simple.
I was too fearful of the world to go out and get fucked, too plagued by hang-ups, memories of shitty girlfriends, fears of violence. Instead I took photos. In the photo my body looked stunning, unblemished, often arched as though trying to escape the top of the frame. I was like a spinster full of anxieties and repression, charged with chaperoning a young girl who could not fathom the justice of the arrangement.
One night when I was feeling exceptionally beautiful and isolated I decided to start sharing the nudes online. I used a website that anonymized usernames and disguised IP address, and I put up three photos with no accompanying text.
About Lillian Fishman
Lillian Fishman was born in 1994 and lives in New York. She received her MFA from NYU, Acts of Service is her first novel.
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