In her column “Rage on the Page,” Melisa Guleryuz ’27 reviews books about anger in women’s literature.

Editor’s Note: This article is a review and includes subjective thoughts, opinions and critiques.

“I had thought that sex might allow me to forget myself, but instead it made me think more aggressively, more obsessively, about who I was,” thinks Eve, the protagonist of Lillian Fishman’s “Acts of Service.” 

“Acts of Service” is not your average queer coming-of-age story; it’s not a romance or a political treatise. It’s a deeply provocative, deeply intimate novel that stares directly at the raw, unfiltered complexities of desire and refuses to look away. 

Erotic, cerebral and occasionally excruciating, Fishman writes not to titillate, but to interrogate. She is less interested in what turns us on than in what that arousal says about who we are.

This isn’t a book for the squeamish. It’s a book for anyone who has ever wanted something and immediately hated themselves for it.

The novel follows Eve, a young, queer Brooklynite who begins the story by cheating on her girlfriend and posting nudes online. That act isn’t just reckless — it’s a kind of philosophical provocation, a way of poking her own sense of self with a stick. She soon finds herself in an erotic entanglement with Nathan, an older man, and Olivia, his enigmatic, confident partner.

What unfolds is not so much a love triangle as a shifting landscape of consent, control, humiliation and curiosity. There is sex — a lot of sex — but Fishman writes it in a way that is more existential than explicit. The sex scenes are tools of exploration, acts of language as much as flesh. They are sites of confusion and confrontation.

“I was not entirely at the mercy of what I wanted, but neither was I in control of it,” Eve remarks.

This quote could be the thesis of the book. Eve is constantly at war with her own wants. Her desire disturbs her. It excites her. It betrays her ideology about sex, mocks her moral posturing and reveals just how much of her personhood is an act  — especially when she insists she’s above performance.

What makes “Acts of Service” so sharp, so startling, is its refusal to moralize. Fishman doesn’t offer Eve up for judgment, but she doesn’t protect her from it either. She allows her protagonist to spiral, contradict herself and say things that many people would find upsetting:

“Nothing is more ordinary than wanting to be hurt.”

That line lands like a slap: it’s seductive and repulsive at once, daring the reader to flinch. In many ways, Eve is the anti-heroine of the current cultural moment. She’s not here to be your empowering protagonist. She doesn’t want to be a symbol. She’s not interested in liberation narratives or self-help arcs. She’s here to feel something real, even if it’s shameful or ugly. Especially if it’s ugly.

This is a novel that understands something essential about being a woman — especially a queer woman — in a world that commodifies identity and packages pleasure as a moral right. “Acts of Service” rejects all of that. It says, what if my pleasure is messy? What if my desires don’t align with my politics? What if I want to be degraded and it has nothing to do with my trauma? What if I don’t want to be fixed?

Fishman’s prose is clean, spare and piercing. There’s no purple prose here — no breathy metaphors or overwrought similes. Her sentences are tight as a wire, constantly vibrating with tension. Every paragraph feels like an argument between Eve and herself. The eroticism is not just in the sex, but in the thinking about the sex.

“When we say that sex is political, we mean, in part, that it is impossible to do the wrong thing without doing the right thing.”

That line is brutal. It captures the book’s ambivalence, and its refusal to clean up the mess it so lovingly unpacks. Every time Eve gets close to understanding herself, she slips, intentionally, into contradiction. She doesn’t want clarity — she wants intensity, and Fishman delivers.

“Acts of Service” is the rare novel that explores sex not as a plot device, but as a philosophical act. It is provocative in the truest sense, asking questions it doesn’t try to answer. It leaves you unsettled, and that’s the point.

Fishman doesn’t offer catharsis but a mirror: one that’s held too close, angled just so, forcing you  to look at the parts of yourself you’ve learned to ignore. The parts you want to want. The parts you want to destroy.

This isn’t a novel you recommend lightly. It’s the kind of book you press into someone’s hands and say, “You might hate this. But if you don’t — you’ll never stop thinking about it.”