Topless

Topless opens with Bliss Barnes opening her antique kimono and examining her breasts in the mirror. A banker is on the phone who wants her to describe them to him. From this low point in her life she embarks on a series of blind dates and surgeries. The horrors of each medical procedure — core biopsy, wired mamogragm, chemo itself, Upper G.I series with small bowel follow-through, plastic surgery—compete with sad date after date. After an operation, her breast is balled like a man's sock that just came out of the dryer. She was taught that it is a woman's job to be beautiful. A divorced woman, a poet and painter, with two grown children, she longs for love and sexual fulfillment. Her battle to achieve the latter, and her desire for her breasts to remain matching, is the backdrop to a moving and amusing story of motherhood and modern life. Even her Shih Tzu, Sachi, whose name means Bliss in Japanese, is an ambiguous source of comfort and threat. The men she meets, Mr. Looseleaf, Mr. Bike, Older is Better, the vulture from Sylvia Plath's poem, "Death & Co," the "Philip Roth-flavored math professor," with whom she and her friend Hedda form a triangle, provide distraction from trauma for Bliss and hilarity for the reader. There are many triangles. Bliss lives in Tribeca. She paints herself nude and one such suitor points to the triangle on the canvas between her legs and calls it her signature: "the triangle beneath Canal Street," he says. "Why are there two of everything?" he asks. "I like to try again," Bliss says. "Maybe there's a second man, too," he says, looking around. The reader keeps looking for the right man too, till the last chapter.