Maiden
Cynthia Buchanan
“A hilarious first novel.”
The New Yorker
The New Yorker
“Fortune Dundy . . . like many a heroine since Emma Bovary . . . [is] artist enough to have made herself, very deftly, out of available trash.”
Life Magazine
Life Magazine
“She was a virgin and her virginity had burrowed in.”
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.
Praise
"Cynthia Buchanan is a writer of such alarming, unruly, bravura brilliance that I can hardly believe she exists. A formal and linguistic firebomb, as obscenely funny as it is devastating, Maiden is an astonishing excavation of the ideologies of sex and romance—so audacious, so true, so sublimely deranged by our ragged longings for love. Reading it is like watching someone do a trapeze act with a mouth full of dental instruments. It’s a scandal that it ever went out of print."
Avigayl Sharp, author of Offseason
“Cynthia Buchanan is a brilliant satirist. Maiden is Day of the Locust if Nathanael West had his consciousness raised and a sense of humor.”
Lili Anolik, author of Didion and Babitz
“I love Maiden so much I can’t even do it justice! . . . An American classic, it’s wonderful.”
Lily Tomlin
"A delicious, painful book . . . Maiden compares with Play It As It Lays and The Bell Jar; these books form a natural trilogy. In some ways Maiden is the best of the three: less calculated, less mercilessly expert than Joan Didion's book, more sure of being a novel than Sylvia Plath's, more various than either—ranging surely through satire and the gentlest of romances to blood-sacrifice."
New York Times Book Review
“This fresh, efficient first novel speaks directly [to] the folly of women who define themselves only in terms of men and the tyranny of a culture that penalizes them unless they do so.”
TIME
“A brilliant, hysterically funny book.”
Library Journal
“Dazzling."
Newsweek
Cynthia Buchanan
A native of Arizona and Texas, Cynthia Buchanan received an M.A. in Creative Writing from the University of the Americas and held a Fulbright fellowship in Spain. A novelist, essayist, and playwright, her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Newsweek, and elsewhere.