Queer with Endometriosis

When Ada is thirteen, she falls in love for the first time. When she talks about Elja, it’s with soft, almost tentative memories. The two teenagers explore their bodies at their own pace, far from normative ideas about desire or beauty. Their bodies do not have to be “right,” not slim, not conventional. “The closeness to Elja is still tangible now, fifteen years later, as if the body has its own memory of this connection.”
Dara Brexendorf’s prose debut Paradise Beach moves between two timeframes: Ada’s first lesbian love on the Baltic coast and her present life as an adult who scouts filming locations for movie productions. In her apartment, Ada constantly listens to the sounds of the house. The “clearing of the throat” neighbor—a loud, unpredictable, and presumably violent man—becomes a latent threat. When one day he bangs down his apartment door and leaves it wide open, the threat nearly turns into a permanent background hum. Ada repeatedly returns in thought to his dog as well.

Back to the Baltic Coast of Her Youth

The sounds of the present pull her back to the Baltic coast of her youth, to the titular “Paradise Beach,” a fries stand right on the shore. Ada lives there with her mother, her aunt, and cousin in the old house of their deceased grandmother—a house that feels both familiar and hostile, angular, odd, never truly livable. Together with her cousin Lill, Ada discovers her bisexuality, experiences first intimacy, and at the same time encounters the encroachment of a patriarchal world that doesn’t stop at this summer sanctuary. They drink for the first time, seek closeness and belonging, while Ada keeps hesitating to throw herself wholly into situations.

Brexendorf writes with a strong emphasis on perception. Memories remain fragile, uncertain, often stored physically in the body. Ada herself recognizes the unreliability of her memory of—“of which she isn’t even sure whether it happened exactly as she recalls.” The motif of “pain memory” is especially striking: the idea that fear and pain imprint themselves permanently on the body.

Ada Simply Considers Her Pain Normal
In this way Brexendorf crafts a sensitive portrayal of a protagonist who has suffered from endometriosis since her youth, and whose pain goes barely noticed by those around her. Ada has mastered endurance to the point of obsession: “perhaps she even saw it as a contest in endurance.” She does not talk to Lill or Elja about her symptoms and eventually falls silent. For a long time she simply assumes the pain is normal. Only through hormone therapy after her operation does she receive medical treatment. Yet even this changes her body again, forcing her to relearn herself and her body. In online forums and doctors’ offices she searches for answers and a vocabulary for something she had years earlier been unable to name.

Nature and Body in Conversation

And yet, this is also the novel’s greatest weakness. While Ada’s isolation and inner stiffness are rendered with palpable clarity, the book struggles to turn this into narrative tension or emotional depth. The prose often feels stubbornly slow, repetitive, and strangely empty. Many scenes drag on without offering new insights. I would have welcomed more of Ada’s adult inner life—more internal monologues, a clearer reckoning with how she is dismissed by doctors, more detail about the long road to a diagnosis, and a clearer sense of her future. Instead, much remains suggested or fades away. Even the subplot about the throat-clearing neighbor felt more confusing than narratively necessary.

Paradise Beach shines brightest when Brexendorf links nature and the body. The summer scenes along the Baltic coast carry a strong sensuous force: you can almost feel the sand between the toes and in the crevices of the body, the heat on the skin, the ice cream melting over sunburned arms. It’s especially vivid around the “Dormant” statue in Kiel’s Schrevenpark, at whose feet Ada finally finds sleep among the roses. In those moments the novel comes alive and feels accessible. Between them, however, much substantive ground is left unfilled.