This Is Not For You

This Is Not For You, perhaps Rule's most self-consciously literary and philosophical novel, tells the story of a young woman in the late 1950s and early 1960s as she negotiates her lesbian sexuality. This epistolary lament — an unsent letter to a lover who was never quite a lover — vividly depicts New York and London and a group of friends as they search, sometimes in vain, for a sustaining love in a time of strict societal constraints.