Exile in Guyville: Stories (Winner of the BOA Editions Short Fiction Prize)

In the stories of Exile in Guyville, probable futures and alternate realities take aim at unruly women, and show how they refuse to be ruled.

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With a speculative and surreal style, Amy Lee Lillard's prize-winning collection explores a living museum of women from across time; a life app that forces women to comply with beauty standards; a future internment camp with a literal race for survival; and a band of middle-aged Riot Grrrls, taking vengeance with a new power.

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With humor, rage, and a razor-sharp eye for detail, Exile in Guyville renders the invisible as seen, and the powerless as empowered. Published by BOA Editions. 

A Grotesque Animal: A Memoir

At the age of forty-three, Amy Lee Lillard learned she was autistic. She learned she was part of a community of unseen women who fell through the gaps due to medical bias and social stereotypes.

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A Grotesque Animal explores the making, unmaking, and making again of a woman with an undiagnosed disorder. How did a working-­ class background and a deep-rooted Midwest culture of silence lead to hiding in plain sight for decades? How did sexuality and anger hide the roots of trauma among the women in her family? And what does it mean to be a queer, disabled, aging woman, a descendent of wild but tamed mothers and a survivor of the things patriarchy inflicts?

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Through wide-ranging styles and a combination of personal storytelling and cultural analysis, Lillard dissects anger, sexuality, autistic masking, bodies, punk, and female annihilation to create a new picture of modern women. Published by University of Iowa Press.

Dig Me Out: Stories

Back in print! Originally published by Atelier26 Books, and now available in new paperback form.

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In this multilayered, provocative, and outrageously imaginative literary debut, Amy Lee Lillard gives us ten deeply absorbing stories about the women who won’t smile: angry, aching women reacting to the dismissal of their most secret or beloved needs and desires, women returning to base instincts, primal fears, and mythic power. Across past, present, and future, around the midwest and the world, these women demand we witness as they work to break through, to defy, to become. It won’t be pretty, and it won’t be safe, but it will be real.

A Woman is a God: A Novel

When Shannon and her queer chosen family turned seventy, they created a communal home, a place for them to live out their days together. But as years pass, and death takes her friends, Shannon becomes the last.

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Until one day, when her dead friends return. And Shannon discovers how powerful she has become.

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Over the course of one week, Shannon transforms her body into beasts, sees into the lives she might have lived, watches time spool and unspool, and visits a land of myth and legend to meet the original woman. And as the week nears its end, Shannon must grapple with her own life and death, and what comes next.

Not a Stitch to Wear: A Novel

On a hot June night, inspired and desperate, fifty-year-old Cora slips out of her house without clothes, and experiences a freedom she’s never known. Until recently, Cora was the anonymous hands, outstretched arms, and running feet in a stock photo catalog. But when she’s unceremoniously fired, Cora feels lost and invisible, an aging woman in a world that prizes young, sheathed and stilleto’d bodies. She communes with her hero, David Bowie, until the moment of release in the dark night.

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After her naked forays, Cora is joined by Evelyn, a seventy-year-old neighbor with a fiery nudist past, and Avery, a thirty-year-old nurse disgusted by her body and shamed by her family. Together, they create Nude Girls Live, a manifesto and a movement. With growing devotees, massive media attention and protests, and legal firestorms, the group plans a festival and performance event, and the women power towards a very public reckoning.

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With aged rage, surreal trappings, and an ancestry of Andrea Lawlor, Mona Awad and Margaret Atwood, Not a Stitch to Wear dissects the inanity of women’s clothing and wonders what happens when we’ve had enough.