A set of short stories with such thorough character development and such clear, succinct, and essence depicting prose that I read the whole set without once wishing I were reading a novel instead (I tend to get bored with short stories about 1/3 of the way through the collection).
The stories run the gamut of professions, relationship statuses, races, and problematic situations. Just about all of them got me thinking about some little aspect of life that I hadn’t necessarily considered before. While the characters are all different, they do seem to all share an earnestness, a tendency toward reflection, a (shared with us) path to insight, and a focus on whether or not they are, indeed, good people. A few over thinkers (unfortunately, I do identify with this). I loved the exploration of human fitness and honesty within relationships. There is plenty of dramatic tension, but of the “it could happen to me” variety and not the melodrama that so many people seem to crave.
I liked all of the stories but here are a few that tickled my thinking bone: a VP of film production heading to Alabama to convince the religious author of a popular marriage book to allow a gay couple in the movie; a babysitter for a future internet billionaire; a woman researching the “Billy Graham rule” that “if you’re a married man, you don’t spend time alone with another woman;” a covid story that unearths strange behavior patterns in a long time couple.
Quotes:
“He’s the kind of writer, I trust, about whom current students in the program have heated opinions; I’m the kind of writer their mothers read while recovering from knee surgery. To be clear, I’m mocking neither my readers nor myself – it took a long time, but eventually, I stopped seeing women as inherently ridiculous.”
“Even if it takes a month to get through a novel, the ritual still anchors me, the access to lives I’ll never live.”
“Among the gifts Alison had given me years before when she said ‘only white women are afraid of getting old’ was the reminder, at a time when I’d needed it, of just how many cultural narratives were optional rather than compulsory.”
“I hadn’t thought adulation was something I wanted or needed; I had thought companionship sufficed. But I’d failed to anticipate how calamitous the standard erosion of affection over time could be when you started with a modicum as opposed to an abundance.”
“Not for the first time, it occurs to her that perhaps, rather than exploring the customs of married, heterosexual socializing, she is inadvertently demonstrating the isolation of modern life.”
“I’d noticed over time that neither she nor Cheryl insulted themselves in the reflexive, somewhat disingenuous way my white friends did; Allison and Cheryl didn’t use self-criticism as a bid for either praise or bonding.”
Thank you to Random House and NetGalley for providing an advance copy of this book in exchange for my honest review. The book will be published on February 25th, 2025.
Books to look forward to ... 