GOING THROUGH THE MOTIONS
(NOVEL)
1982 McClelland & Stewart
1983 St.Martin's Press, New York
Available at your local library or secondhand bookstore.

Cornered on stage by a leering drunk, Joan Sincere reacts instinctively: with one swift kick she shatters her assailants slack jaw. When the story makes the front page of the morning tabloid, her employer, fearing more than publicity, fires her.

Sincere is thirty, single, and uncertain of her next move. She has been "takin' it off" in dingy nightclubs and rowdy bars for ten years. Gone are the ideals she held as a promising young ballerina. In their place she harbours the fears of all strippers - being old, tired, fat and alone.

The Toronto Star said Govier had a "sentence making skill to stop traffic.". Now in GOING THROUGH THE MOTIONS, her second novel, Govier employs her impressive gifts to champion one woman's courage and independence.

Praise for GOING THROUGH THE MOTIONS

"GOING THROUGH THE MOTIONS is notable not only for the intelligence of it's controlling metaphor, worked out as a conflict between artistic ideals and commercial success, but also for it's astonishing portrayal of life in a ballet studio, it's all-too-real rendering of what it takes to become a ballerina."
- The Calgary Herald

"GOING THROUGH THE MOTIONS is truly a contemporary novel - one in which the heroine is cast as a stripper, the outlaw fighting to preserve dignity and a sense of worth in the face of society's derision. What image could be more literally and figuratively persuasive in depicting the plight of the individual?...Govier's obviously well-researched description of the clubs and bars..is vivid, precise, fully savoured."
- Toronto Star