Stay and Fight Summary
Madeline ffitch

Stay and Fight Overview

Madeline ffitch’s Stay and Fight explores the struggles of parenting in the face of poverty and discrimination, tension between wealthier townspeople and poorer rural inhabitants, and ancestral knowledge in contemporary Appalachian Ohio. The novel alternates among first-person past tense narrations by Helen, a single woman from Seattle, her lesbian co-habitants Karen and Lily, and Karen and Lily’s son Perley. Themes of the novel include family, psychiatry, colonialism, nature, and feminism.