These included her mother, who was appointed caretaker of her young son, Jackson, after Romy’s arrest, and her time at the Mars Room, the seedy nightclub where Romy worked as a stripper in San Francisco. As Romy listened to Lipp’s rambling, dark thoughts, and personal biography, Romy was prompted to reflect on the significant events and people in her own past.

She sat next to Laura Lipp, who, like Romy, was one of the only white prisoners on the bus. In various portions of the novel, Doc’s, Hauser’s, and Kennedy's stories are told in the third-person point of view.Īs the novel begins, Romy was one of 60 prisoners shackled together and traveling by bus, in the middle of the night, from a county jail in Los Angeles north to Stanville. The novel also follows Gordon Hauser, an English teacher at Stanville Doc, a convicted murderer and former corrupt police officer serving time in New Folsom Prison and Kurt Kennedy, the man Romy killed. The story fluctuates between Romy’s experiences as she adjusts to life in Stanville, and her reflections on her troubled past in San Francisco, recollections which gradually reveal the circumstances that led to her imprisonment. Romy is the primary, first person narrator of the novel. Rachel Kushner’s novel primarily follows the life of Romy Hall, a single mother who, in 2003, at the age of twenty-nine, began a double life-sentence at Stanville Women’s Correctional Facility, a maximum-security prison in California’s Central Valley.

The following version of this book was used to create the guide: Kushner, Rachel.

The mars room book