The Girl With The Green Lipstick is many things.  As a novel, it is a potboiler filled with colorful characters involved in competing narratives of the search for love on the one hand, and on the other, the career of a gifted grifter.  In pure plot terms, when these two pursuits and the people who embody them collide, it screams “you’re-not-going-to-believe-this,” but in fact it is a true story.  Truth is stranger than fiction, but then, so are our psyches.

 

That latter consideration is what makes this such a compelling story. What is it about us that seeks to be loved, to be understood, to be valued?  Why is that yearning so strong in some of us that we will continue to seek it when any rational analysis would tell us that what we’re experiencing is abuse: physical, psychological, emotional, and with real world effects like being taken for our fortunes?  What is it about the nature of sex, whether engaged in or denied, that it can become the psychological currency of the realm, when sex itself is not even what the heart seeks?  And how do those injured in these cataclysms ever recover?

 

This story speaks of a successful, generous, and affectionate man who has found true and meaningful love with his wife, but she dies.  Hidden beneath, but exposed as the story progresses, is how long his journey was in finding that relationship, the many painful chapters in his youth and early adult life which preceded it, and the catastrophic impact of his loss when she dies, in his arms, after a long battle with cancer.  His attempts to heal lead him to The Girl With The Green Lipstick, who cruelly toys with him and has her own tortured and torturing history behind her.  You’ll have to read it to see how it plays out, but I can say with certainty that it would make a very compelling movie.

 

In short, as fiction, or even a true-to-life novel, it’s a great story.  But as a psychological map of the main characters, its truly fascinating, and a tour-de-force of self-awareness by its author, who makes no attempt to shield his vulnerabilities.

​

– WILLIAM S. - AMAZON REVIEWER