Topless opens with Bliss Barnes opening her antique kimono and examining her breasts in the mirror. A banker is on the phone who wants her to describe them to him. From this low point in her life she embarks on a series of blind dates and surgeries. The horrors of each medical procedure — core biopsy, wired mamogragm, chemo itself, Upper G.I series with small bowel follow-through, plastic surgery—compete with sad date after date. After an operation, her breast is balled like a man's sock that just came out of the dryer. She was taught that it is a woman's job to be beautiful. A divorced woman, a poet and painter, with two grown children, she longs for love and sexual fulfillment. Her battle to achieve the latter, and her desire for her breasts to remain matching, is the backdrop to a moving and amusing story of motherhood and modern life. Even her Shih Tzu, Sachi, whose name means Bliss in Japanese, is an ambiguous source of comfort and threat.

The men she meets, Mr. Looseleaf, Mr. Bike, Older is Better, the vulture from Sylvia Plath's poem, "Death & Co," the "Philip Roth-flavored math professor," with whom she and her friend Hedda form a triangle, provide distraction from trauma for Bliss and hilarity for the reader.

There are many triangles. Bliss lives in Tribeca. She paints herself nude and one such suitor points to the triangle on the canvas between her legs and calls it her signature: "the triangle beneath Canal Street," he says. "Why are there two of everything?" he asks. "I like to try again," Bliss says. "Maybe there's a second man, too," he says, looking around.

The reader keeps looking for the right man too, till the last chapter.

Jill Hoffman has a BA from Bennington, a Master's degree from Columbia, and a Ph.D from Cornell. She received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1974 - 1975. She has taught at Columbia University, Brooklyn College, Bard, The University of North Carolina, and The New School. Presently, she teaches a Mudfish Writing Workshop on Zoom from her Tribeca studio. She is also a painter and has shown in Theta Gallery. She has also painted the covers for many of the Box Turtle Press books.

Hoffman's first novel Jilted was published by Simon & Schuster in 1993. Her second novel, Stoned, was Mudfish Fiction Series #1. Kimono with Young Girl Sleeves, is Mudfish Individual Poet Series #20. Before that, Box Turtle Press published her collection, black diaries, poems, in 2000, and The Gates of Pearl, a hybrid book-length poem in 2018. Hoffman founded Box Turtle Press in 1983 which has since published 3 novels, 25 issues of Mudfish, and 21 Mudfish Individual Poet Series.

"They're just right. Soft and expressive, says Bliss Barnes when asked to describe her breasts to a personal ad suitor. So opens Jill Hoffman's Topless, the funniest. poignant, most beautifully written, pleasurable saga of a woman's journey through breast cancer and the exhilarating disappointments of online dating. She nudges aside the medical mores of technicians, nurses, doctors, oncologists, and the Gilda's Club support group, as few have met anyone like Bliss, with her charm and allure which she refuses to leave in the waiting room. Her verbal stink bombs explode as she courageously marches on in her long-pointed boots undergoing chemo (making it a picnic), multiple surgeries, radiation, and match dates. Delightful and inspiring, harrowing and breathtakingly funny, yet always a bittersweet undertow at the vulnerabilities of the flesh." — Stephanie Emily Dickinson, Author of Harlow/Smith Postcards: Icons in Black & White

"I just read the first 40 pages of Topless! If the rest of it is this good, I'll move to Tribeca, buy a red Indian motorcycle with a sidecar (for the dog), sit on the motorcycle reading left-wing newspapers and, when you're ready, take you shopping. Every day." — Robert Clinton, author of All These Things I Will Give to You, mudfish.org

"read another 40 pages — no complaints — did you really live through all that?" — Robert Clinton, author of All These Things I Will Give to You, mudfish.org

"It's not like anything I've ever read. If I were her, I'd wake up in the morning very proud. Then I'd be proud all day….It's so good, in fact, that I'm in some dread of analyzing, putting my words over hers in an attempt at appreciation." — Robert Clinton, author of All These Things I Will Give to You, mudfish.org

"Because Topless, a new novel by Jill Hoffman, is written by a cancer survivor, one knows from the start that survival will be an option. Because it's written by someone who is a master of the tricks of prose- I mean smooth shadings, quick movements, gambling with the readers, mint observations, love and fear, etc.- one knows from the start to expect absurdity and irony, strong love, and angry impatience. This is a book which daylights one of the darkest torments available to a woman. Because this woman is smart and funny and serious, we can witness how such a woman orders her days around this schedule of violent and tedious therapies.Help comes from her family (who carry and impatience beneath their sympathies, though their sympathies are profound). She does it with help from her garrulous friends (who listen intelligently but also demand to be heard). She takes advantage of what strength there is in her little dog- and even the dog occasionally has other concerns. And she's unquestionably defended and embraced by New York itself- its billion clothing stores and restaurants, its peaceful hairdressers and pedicure parlors, icy streets and interesting strangers. Are you allergic to any medications? Just cats." — Bob Clinton, Author of All These Things I Will Give to You

"A second tension or charge the book carries is the narrator's desperation at the absence of sex from her life. There are a multitude of internet-arranged dates, none of which provoke real desire and to which there are no follow-ups. Sexual frustration is as daily as, and oddly balances, the innumerable hospitals and clinics with which the narrator gains an unwilling familiarity. One waits for the resolution of both crises. One reads along the nerve of a woman's desires and fears. And not incidentally but frankly and deliberately the value of marijuana is described with gratitude as a safe route through pain.Home in Tribeca with her dog, she dreads the outcome of what seems like dozens of reconstructive surgeries. She imagines terrible asymmetries and recalls a beauty she may have lost. She wants her breasts to resemble each other again, to fit her, easily and calmly. And Jill Hoffman, who has guided her readers through, and helped them survive, her manifold, life-altering injuries, can finally reassure them. There is even, for her and for us, an interesting stranger." — Bob Cliton, Author of All These Things I Will Give to You