Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #414349 in Books
• Published on: 2000-08-25
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 192 pages

Synopsis
Carroll Mine, a lonely man who has difficulty relating to people, hangs out at Indiscretions, a strip club in Southern California, in hopes of making some kind of connection.

Customer Reviews

The Life We All Live
A perfect rendition of the life everyone lives . . . lonely, secluded, and surreal. The novel screams of O'Brien's talent to connect with the seedy and realistic side of our world. First class entertainment. Maybe it should be retitled "Life Lessons." A must read for everyone, especially O'Brien fans.

A touching and lyrical character study
Stripper Lessons took me two places I will probably never go in real life -- a strip club and the mind of a lonely outcast. I found myself identifying with Carroll, and while Stevie never became a real flesh-and-blood person in my mind, I think she was meant to stay unreal because that's how Carroll saw her. I thought this was a poetic, moving study of one quietly desperate man's attempt to fit in, and it made me want to read other works by O'Brien.

You can relate to Carroll,but you'd never admit it to anyone
The main character, Carroll, is a milktoast loner, and O'Brien lets us see inside the head of the type of person most people would never get to know. The books reads like part poetry/part confessional, and his unconventional writing only adds to the story (e.g. capitalizing "That Place"). People like Carroll are everywhere, lonely and afraid, and we probably pass them every day at work, on the streets or in the hall. Stripper Lessons also gives us a glimpse (metaphorically speaking) at strippers, though it would have been nice to get a little more insight into those strip for a living, why they do it, how it makes them feel, and what they think of all the Carrolls they meet day after day.