There Are No Happy Loves: A Retrospective of Forgotten Films

By Sophie Gertrude Strohmeier
Tuscaloosa, AL: Two Trick Pony Press, 2018. Edition of 49.
6.25" x 4.5"; 16 pages. Letterpress printed. Pamphlet bound. Numbered. Signed by Strohmeier and Scarr.
Sarah Scarr: “The films in ‘There Are No Happy Loves’ are fictional. The project is a dream line up of imagined films cast with lesbian icons of film for a fictional film festival. It’s literary fan fiction for film obsessed queers. The author sees the overlap of real/imagined as part of the project. I’d say it’s in the tradition of Edgar Allen Poe, Borges, and Michael Martone who are all authors that use the format of nonfiction to tell fictional stories. It’s meant to be mischievous.”
Selections include this one of “Phantom Trial” starring Sharon Tate and Elizabeth Taylor.
Sharon Tate discovers the presence of Elizabeth Taylor in her street: starring as a soap opera icon with a relentless appetite for adoration, the grease of lipstick, flowers, and human skin. A film that discusses the nature of cleavage: does it combine or separate? And furthermore, what does it cleave: bodies to one another, or skulls in two ..
Sarah Scarr: "This book is part of the Queer Chapbook Trio published in the summer of 2018. A program for an imagined film festival, fan fiction for all the best lesbian films that never were. This text first appeared in ‘Apofenie’ on May 4, 2018.”
"About the author: Sophie Gertrude Strohmeier is a bilingual writer and translator of fiction and nonfiction. Her long-lost love, however, is illustration. She received her BA in Romance Studies from the University of Vienna, and an MFA in Fiction from the University of Alabama. A 2016 Lambda Literary Fellow, Strohmeier is the author of the surrealist Lesbian novel ‘Küss Mich, Libussa’ (edition a, 2013, in German). She lives in Brooklyn."