Maiden - Cynthia Buchanan

A thirty-year-old virgin embarks on a quest to find true love in this rediscovered post-modern tragicomedy.

“She was a virgin and her virginity had burrowed in. . . . the idea of sex had such a grip on her that she tried to avoid, totally, thinking about sex.”

Cynthia Buchanan’s Maiden was a sensation when it was published in 1972, earning comparisons to the generation-defining novels of Sylvia Plath and Joan Didion. More than fifty years later, it remains a startlingly contemporary, highly stylish satire of heterosexual romance and the sex-and-drug-addled California of the 1960s.

Thirty-year-old Fortune Dundy is not ready to give up on finding her one true love. Unencumbered by experience or social grace, she pursues romance through endless date-matching questionnaires and personal ads, a virginal Don Quixote in rhinestones and sequins. Her only confidant is Bert, named for the real-life host of the televised Miss America pageant, who lives in her head and offers commentary on her every disastrous interaction with the opposite sex.

A flyer for a swinging singles apartment complex named Villa Dionysus beckons Fortune to Southern California, where she hopes to find love amid the sand and suntan oil. She meets a slew of desperate characters—including her roommate Biscuit, an embittered divorcee with a psychotic jealous streak; Milo, Biscuit’s boorish new boyfriend; and Skip, a handsome and elusive dentist—who become ensnared in her quest for the Right One.

A glitter-and-blood tragicomedy as audacious as Eve Babitz’s boozy stories of California malaise, written at a time when postmodern fiction was considered the province of male writers, Maiden is a true American literary original, and Fortune Dundy one of literature’s most lovable antiheroines: hopeful, delusional, and absolutely unforgettable.