Amy Guth is a comedian by training–she got into the funny business after college, while working a handful of jobs in Manhattan, and studied at the Second City Training Center after moving to Chicago in 2001. “I was the one who could be talked into falling or crashing into things,” she says. “I didn’t see a lot of women doing physical comedy of any kind, so I thought I’d give it a whirl.”
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But though her first novel, Three Fallen Women (So New Media), has a few scenes that play as comedy– albeit a very black sort, like a runaway housewife turned serial killer slicing off a guy’s testicles–it’s not exactly a laugh riot. Its other main characters are a heroin addict and an artist emerging from a breakdown, and the three story lines were inspired by a time when Guth knew a lot of women making “really destructive and unhealthy choices that were landing them in trouble again and again. I sort of boiled down the major themes I was seeing to three.”
She never reminds people to turn off their cell phones. “Inevitably one will ring, and I’ll just go answer it,” she says. Poor phone manners also give her an excuse to whip out her trusty roll of duct tape. One rude text-messager got his phone taped to his thigh. Another guy, who took her “open-door policy on heckling” a bit too far and tried to proposition her, got his mouth taped shut.
