This interview contains spoilers for “Girls Girls Girls.”
Shoshana von Blanckensee didn’t think anyone would ever read “Girls Girls Girls.” The 47-year-old queer Jewish writer and oncology nurse isn’t being self-effacing when she says this to me over Zoom. Realistic would perhaps be a better word.
When she first started writing what would become her debut novel about 20 years ago, queer novels mostly didn’t get published. And if they did, they were smaller releases through independent publishers. Shoshana worked on “Girls Girls Girls” long enough to see queer novels and voices force their way into the cultural arena and zeitgeist. But even with that shift, Shoshana thought she was just muscling her way through to the end of a manuscript, finishing the book for the sake of finishing it.
I cannot begin to express how thrilled I am that she was wrong.
“Girls Girls Girls,” which comes out today (June 17, 2025) via G.P. Putnam’s Sons, is an intimate portrait of being young, Jewish and gay in the ’90s — something I, a ’90s baby who grew up to be a Jewish dyke, never personally experienced but have long craved access to.
The novel follows 18-year-old Hannah and her girlfriend Sam as they leave their closeted, sheltered lives (and Hannah’s beloved Bubbe) in Long Beach, New York to build a new life for themselves in the Gay Promised Land, San Francisco. But the pair quickly realize that getting to San Francisco is only the first step — the trick is figuring out how they can afford to stay.
With no money and no real skills, stripping seems to be their only option. Dancing works for Sam. But it doesn’t work for Hannah. She doesn’t want to feel beholden to the club and instead starts working as an escort for an older lesbian. But this, too, leaves Hannah feeling trapped. And worse, it begins to drive a wedge between her and Sam.
But going home absolutely isn’t an option. Hannah isn’t out to her strictly Orthodox mother, not to mention she has been avoiding calling her the entire time she’s been in San Francisco. Through sheer will paired with stripping, sex work, break ups and, later, the news that Bubbe is dying, Hannah must figure out who she is in the world, find community and discover what being Jewish means to her.
As Shoshana writes in a reader letter in the beginning of “Girls Girls Girls,” Hannah’s story is based upon her own real-life experience as a queer teenager in San Francisco in the late ’90s. If the book were not already achingly poignant, this context makes “Girls Girls Girls” even more so.
And for Jewish queers like myself, Shoshana’s portrayal of Hannah’s deep Jewishness, even when she doesn’t yet know how to reconcile her Jewish and queer identities into one, is also deeply felt.
“You are not [a shiksa], silly girl,” Bubbe reminds Hannah at one point when Hannah jokes that being away from family has practically made her not Jewish. “You can’t escape yourself that easily.”
Shoshana caught up with me a few weeks ago over Zoom to talk about writing “Girls Girls Girls” over two decades, queer ’90s nostalgia and what she hopes young queer Jews take away from the book.
This interview has been lightly condensed and edited for clarity.
How did the book come to be?
Oh my gosh, it took forever to come to be. I started it as little prose poems about my life. It’s very much fiction at this point, but there are pieces of it that are just completely true. My grandmother did have polio as a kid, and she lived in Long Beach. I grew up in the Bay area, but I felt a connection with her because we both had “other” identities. Even before I came out to her, just her otherness and her speaking about her disability and how she felt watched in the world, I felt a connection around that.
When I was in my mid-20s and writing it, my experiences were very recent and it wouldn’t have been the same book if I had banged it out. I mean, first of all, it wouldn’t have been published in the early 2000s. But I wrote it as little prose poems, and the stripping and sex work part was kind of in your face. Like, “I don’t care!” As I moved on, my adult brain developed, and I was thinking about what stripping was for me, the good and the hard. Not just the defensiveness that I felt at the time.
Totally.
To more specifically answer your question, I wrote it on and off forever… I was working on it in little pieces. But I didn’t really have the confidence to really push it. And being a late ‘90s queer person, I have a lingering feeling of “nobody cares about us.” Nobody cares about our community. And that’s not actually true anymore. I’m always reminding myself like, whoa, we’re actually too much in the spotlight sometimes, because it comes with a lot of bad stuff too.
But queer books are published all the time now. At the time [I was first writing], it was tiny presses. When Michelle Tea’s “Valencia” was published by SealPress that was like, whoo! Something happened. And I feel lucky that in San Francisco in the late ’90s, there were so many writers. So much art was coming out of that community. So I have all these amazing writer friends who I sent the book to and was like, help. And I got a lot of useful feedback. At that point, I felt like, oh, I actually wrote something that has some decent things in it.
Was the character of Bubbe drawing on your own relationship and grandmother?
Well, it was my grandmother. Actually, I made Bubbe a combo of two people in my life. I had a Jewish queer therapist that I paid for by stripping – the best thing that ever happened to me was having enough money to go to therapy with a queer Jewish therapist in San Francisco. And she gave me all of this parenting that I desperately needed.
I saw her from probably 20 to 23 or 24, and a lot of Bubbe’s lines are direct quotes from her. My own grandmother, the way she lived and the way she talked, that’s all there. But she was a little harsher and she didn’t always say the right thing. So it’s a combo of both of them. Since writing it, both of them have died. I think I’ll forever feel very emotional about both of them.
I’m interested in what you said about feeling like people still don’t care about the queer community. And as I was reading the book, I noticed in myself this feeling of nostalgia for ‘90s San Francisco, even though I was born in ’97. I wasn’t even alive or aware for the entire period of the book. But I just feel so nostalgic for this idea of a place where you could just be queer and live your life, with the very large caveat of the AIDS crisis and not having basic rights. I was trying to pinpoint that nostalgia and I realized that maybe I was feeling attracted towards this idea of an upward trajectory politically that existed then and doesn’t feel as possible now.
There was upward trajectory, but it was almost like we were so bubbled off from the world that we weren’t even – I mean, nobody I knew was like, I can’t wait until we can get legally married! We were like, fuck you! We’re marrying anyway. We’re doing whatever the fuck we want. We’re our own world. We love each other, we know who we are. It was a really politically active time, and a ton of creativity was happening, and the bubble was just a cushion around us. Shit was happening left and right, like, horrible things. Everyone was used to an incredible amount of homophobia and sexism. But it felt like we were like a gang. I mean, we were.
How does it feel to have the book coming out now, when that version of San Francisco doesn’t exist, and also things are so bad politically?
It’s wild. I don’t even know how to process it politically. I guess I do feel like the feedback I’ve gotten so far from young queer people is so positive. Now that I’m 47 I feel such an intense desire to scoop up all the young queer people in the world and be like “mine!” And so this book does feel kind of like a present to the young queer people of the world.
I just want to be like, here it is! We existed in a time where there were so few rights. Nobody cared about us. But we’ve always existed. We’ve lived through incredibly trying times in queer history, and this is now a trying time again.
Theoretically, there’s a version of this book that doesn’t have the Jewish piece of it. Why was it important for you to make Hannah so explicitly Jewish and have her relationship with Bubbe be so central to the story?
There was no other way to do it for me. When I was young and secretly stripping and in relation with my own grandmother, I felt like two people. I felt like I’m two different people and I’m not known anywhere. I think once I came out to her, it was easier. It’s not like stripping is a part of my identity. But I felt both things so strongly, my connection with her and then also my entirely other world. The book is a lot about just trying to figure out who the hell you are and where you can fit in the world. And in my own search for self and home I just don’t know how to separate my Jewishness and my queerness and how those intertwined.
For context, can you talk about your Jewish background and upbringing a bit?
I felt like the Judaism that I was raised with was about fighting for everyone’s rights. Part of that is because I was raised a Berkeley hippie Jew and I grew up thinking that all Jews were librarians, professors, social workers and we all went to the same protests. And so when I would hear, actually within the queer community, people being like, “Oh, did you have a really fancy bat mitzvah?” I was like, “What are you talking about?” I had no context for that.
[My Jewishness] was rooted in the ’70s kind of politics and I grew up feeling like Judaism and social justice were just enmeshed, there was no separating them. I hold on to that now.
Did it ever feel like you couldn’t talk about your sex work and stripping because of this almost expectation in the Jewish community surrounding higher education and careers?
I didn’t have big expectations around that kind of thing. But I actually still have a little bit of shame around it in certain circles. This is my coming out to say I stripped in my early 20s. I’m also an oncology nurse and it’s likely that some of my coworkers are going to read this book, which is fine to me.
But I had to hand it to my mom and say, “You’re going to hate this so much. I’m sorry. It’s going to exist in the world.” And she read it and was like, I’m just gonna tell everyone, it’s completely fiction. And I was like, “Mom, that letter in the beginning is gonna stay in the book.” That was a really hard choice. My editors were like, we really want to leave the reader letter in there and I spun out about it. It was going to be really relaxing to just not talk about myself in any way.
But I also felt like if you’ve never done sex work, and you’re writing about sex work, I’m a little suspicious about you. So I didn’t really know what I was gonna do, but once I decided I was like, “OK, I’m doing this.”
The only thing that calms me about it now is I’m just like, I’m 47. I’m not apologizing for choices I made at 19, 20, 21. And now nobody’s going to hurt me or fire me or disown me. I’m safe.
For what it’s worth, I really loved the letter in the beginning. I’ve never done stripping or sex work, but I am also suspicious of anyone creating art about sex work who has never done it. And I also just appreciated the context of how when you first started writing, it was mainly just processing and now this book is a love letter. As a reader, all of that was really grounding.
That makes me happy. There are parts of the book that I feel very emotional about because I feel so tender towards myself as a young person, and then all young queer people. I feel like I would never be able to read it aloud, because I would probably cry.
What do you hope young queer people or Jewish people or queer Jewish people take away from your book?
It’s so easy to beat yourself up and hate yourself for all kinds of reasons. I guess the biggest thing I wish that I had for myself was to be able to see myself now and be like, “Oh my God, you’re doing it! You’re not doing it perfectly, but you’re doing it.”
Finding your way is incredibly, incredibly hard. Finding who you are and what you want to be is incredibly hard when you don’t have role models all around you. I wish that I could have had the tenderness I have now. Find the tenderness for yourself in all of the shittiest moments where you make whatever you think is the worst choice and just remind yourself that this is a part of the process. It’s part of getting where you need to get. Be tender with yourself.
What queer Jewish books and/or authors mean a lot to you?
My friend Sarah Steinberg is an incredible writer, and she has written so much, just in our little world of newsletters and blogs and this and that. She writes in such a moving way, and she’s my heart-to-heart connection about being Jewish and a writer and queer.
“Stone Butch Blues” by Leslie Feinberg is one of my favorite books. That is a book that’s all heart and emotion. And the hard stuff is so hard.
Have you read “Beyond the Pale”? It’s like a historical novel.
I’ve heard of it. I haven’t read it.
This woman, Alana Dykewomon – she changed her last name, and I love her for that – was actually in community with my therapist, which is how I knew about it. They were doing Sinister Wisdom together and that book is just Eastern European Jewish and lezzy lust.
I’m obsessed with that.
I feel like nobody’s talking about it ever. But I love it.
And what’s your next project? Can you talk about it?
So… I initially wrote a sequel to this book…
Oh my God.
I will preface this by saying it won’t actually be a sequel. But it was so enjoyable to write because it’s still the queer community in San Francisco and getting to see Hannah in the joy of it. Queer joy was just beginning as “Girls Girls Girls” ended, and there is so much queer joy to write about.
Basically, the plot involves April, Hannah’s friend who got sober when she became pregnant, relapsing, and Hannah gets tossed this baby who she brings to San Francisco. And then it’s like, the queer community with this baby.
I want to read that so badly.
My new plan is I’m going to turn it into a standalone book. I just have to reimagine how. But I am going to keep queer community getting tossed a baby, because that’s just enjoyable.
Do you foresee Jewishness continuing to come up in your future projects?
Can I keep everybody queer and Jewish in my books? Am I allowed to just write book after book where everyone is queer and Jewish?
I think so. Yes.
