#MARM2025 and #NovNov25: The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood (2005)
It’s my eighth time participating in the annual Margaret Atwood Reading Month (#MARM) hosted by indomitable Canadian blogger Marcie of Buried in Print. In previous years, I’ve read Surfacing and The Edible Woman, The Robber Bride and Moral Disorder, Wilderness Tips, The Door, Bodily Harm and Stone Mattress, and Life Before Man and Interlunar; and reread The Blind Assassin. Novembers are my excuse to catch up on the soon-to-be-86-year-old’s extensive back catalogue. While awaiting a library hold of her memoir, Book of Lives, I’ve also been rereading the 1983 short story collection Bluebeard’s Egg.
Celebrating its 20th anniversary this year is The Penelopiad, Atwood’s contribution to Canongate’s The Myths series, from which I’ve also read the books by Karen Armstrong, A.S. Byatt, Ali Smith and Jeanette Winterson. I remember Armstrong’s basic point being that a myth is not a falsehood, as in common parlance, but a story that is always true even if not literally factual. Think of it as ‘these things happen’ rather than this happened. Greek mythology is every bit as brutal as the Hebrew Bible, and I find it instructive to interpret biblical stories the same way: Focus on timelessness and universality rather than on historicity.
I do the scheduling for my book club, so I cheekily set The Penelopiad as our November book so that it would count towards two blog challenges. Although it’s a feminist retelling of Homer’s The Odyssey, we concluded that it’s not essential to have prior knowledge of the Greek myths. Much of the narrative is from Penelope’s perspective, including from the afterlife. Cliché has it that she waited patiently for 20 years for her husband Odysseus to return from war, chastely warding off all her would-be suitors. But she admits to readers that both she and Odysseus are inveterate liars.
When Odysseus returned, he murdered the suitors and then Penelope’s maids – some of whom had consensual relations with the men; others of whom were raped. The focus is not on the slaughtered suitors, or on Odysseus’s triumphant return and revenge, but on the dozen maids – viz. the chapter title “Odysseus and Telemachus Snuff the Maids.” The murdered maids form a first-person plural voice (a literal Greek chorus) and speak in poetry and song, also commenting on their own plight through an anthropology lecture and a videotaped trial. They appeal to The Furies for posthumous justice, knowing they won’t get it from men (see the Virago anthology Furies). This sarcastic passage spotlights women’s suffering:
Never mind. Point being that you don’t have to get too worked up about us, dear educated minds. You don’t have to think of us as real girls, real flesh and blood, real pain, real injustice. That might be too upsetting. Just discard the sordid part. Consider us pure symbol. We’re no more real than money.
The cover of The Canons edition hints at the maids’ final transformation into legend.
As well as The Odyssey, Atwood drew on external sources. She considers the theory that Penelope was the leader of a goddess cult. Women are certainly the most interesting characters here. Penelope’s jealousy of her cousin Helen (of Troy) and her rocky relationship with her teenage son Telemachus are additional threads. Eurycleia, Odysseus’s nurse, is a minor character, and there is mention of Penelope’s mother, a Naiad. Odysseus himself comes across not as the brave hero but as brash, selfish and somewhat absurd.
Like Atwood’s other work, then, The Penelopiad is subversive and playful. We wondered whether it set the trend for Greek myth retellings – given that those by Pat Barker, Natalie Haynes, Madeline Miller, Jennifer Saint and more emerged 5–15 years later. It wouldn’t be a surprise: she has always been wise and ahead of her time, a puckish prophetess. This fierce, funny novella isn’t among my favourites of the 30 Atwood titles I’ve now read, but it was an offbeat selection that made for a good book club discussion – and it wouldn’t be the worst introduction to her feminist viewpoint.
(Public library)
[198 pages]
Carol Shields Prize Reading: Coleman Hill and Between Two Moons
Two last Carol Shields Prize nominees today: from the shortlist, a gorgeous tapestry of African-American family history; and, from the longlist, a likable debut novel about Muslim twin sisters navigating the febrile summer of their high school graduation in Brooklyn.
Coleman Hill by Kim Coleman Foote
Is this family memoir or autofiction? I’ve shelved it as both on Goodreads; it’s a blend, one for which Foote borrows the term that Audre Lorde coined for Zami, “biomythography.” Like Edwidge Danticat, Jesmyn Ward and Jacqueline Woodson, Foote draws on personal stories but also invokes overarching narratives of Black migration and struggle. The result is magisterial, a debut novel that feels like oral history and a family scrapbook rolled into one.
During the First World War, the Coleman family were part of a mass exodus from the segregated South to the industrialized North. They hoped for a better life in New Jersey than they’d had under slavery and sharecropping in Alabama and Florida, but in fact many of the author’s ancestors became mired in ill-paid service roles (cleaner, maid, refuse collector) and, ironically, ended up having fewer opportunities for advancement than relatives who stayed behind and enrolled in Black educational institutions in the South.
Like a linked short story collection, the book pulls together 15 vignettes stretching from 1916 to 1989 and told in different styles and voices, including AAVE – I’m reliably informed that the audiobook is wonderful for that reason. A prologue in the first-person plural introduces the women who would become family matriarchs: “We wanted to go to school but couldn’t. The walk was too long. We was needed at home to plant and harvest. And boys could get more outta schooling, folks said, so it was our brothers who went.”
Other sections alternate first and third person. I especially admired the use of the second person for passages from the perspective of Celia Coleman, who develops a dependence on Four Roses whisky after being widowed. An interlude gives two poems from the point-of-view of cotton – crop failure was partly responsible for the initial relocation. There are also black-and-white photographs heading each chapter, and a family tree at the start. When I first heard about this book through its longlisting, the idea of family history told by nine characters sounded overwhelming (and potentially worthy). But the voices are so distinct that there is never a danger of getting lost, and the scenes are so vivid that you cringe from the beatings and cheer when a woman stands up to her meddling mother-in-law. There are echoes and reversals across the generations, as alcoholism and domestic abuse recur.
The core story is about Celia’s nastiness and resistance to her son Jeb’s marriage to Bertha Grimes. Bertha, battered by Jebbie and Celia alike, escapes to a brothel where she works as a cleaner. Celia ends up raising their children, along with another set of grandchildren, earning the nickname “Gra’ Coleman” and a reputation for meanness. (One excellent stand-alone story about the younger generation is titled “How to Kill Gra’ Coleman and Live to Tell About It (c. 1950).”) The inherited trauma is clear, yet I never found the content as bleak here as in A Council of Dolls; Foote weaves in enough counterbalancing lightness and love. There are so many strong female characters – Jeb’s older sisters, Bertha’s younger ones; their daughters – and plenty of humour and spirit despite the sometimes distressing subject matter. The family home, and the objects hoarded there, also play a major role.
It’s difficult to suggest the scope, as large and various as any American family’s history. An author’s note at the end details Foote’s approach – somewhere between “channeling spirits” and fictionalizing – to a novel that was many years in the gestation. I’d particularly recommend Coleman Hill to fans of Ayana Mathis and Toni Morrison. For me, there’s no contest; this should win the Carol Shields Prize for Fiction. 
With thanks to publicist Nicole Magas and SJP Lit (Zando) for the free e-copy for review.
Longlisted:
Between Two Moons by Aisha Abdel Gawad
This debut novel is cleverly set within the month of Ramadan, a time of abstention. In this way, Gawad emphasizes the tension between faith and the temptations of alcohol and sex. Egyptian-American twin sisters Amira and Lina Emam are on the cusp, about to graduate from high school and go their separate ways. Lina wants to be a model and is dating a nightclub manager she hopes can make this a reality; Amira, ever the sensible one, is college-bound. But then she meets her first boyfriend, Faraj, and lets Lina drag her into a reckless partying lifestyle. “I was seized with that summertime desire of girls: to push my body to its limits.” Meanwhile, the girls’ older brother, Sami, just home from prison, is finding it a challenge to integrate back into the family and their Bay Ridge mosque, reeling from a raid on a Muslim-owned neighbourhood business and a senseless attack on the old imam.
I feared that a tired terrorism plot would surface and was relieved when this wasn’t the case, although there is a passionate message about the injustice of police surveillance of Muslim communities. I agree with Laura (see her review) that it does at times feel like an adult is producing YA fiction. It’s proficiently written and I enjoyed getting a glimpse into an unfamiliar world, but the novel never truly sparked into life for me. It also commits one of my pet peeves: inserting third-person segments to fill in events that the narrator could not have witnessed (while referring to the other characters as “the mother,” “the boy,” or “the other girl”). One to put on high school curricula but not on a prize list. 
With thanks to Laura for passing on her copy.
And a DNF:
You Were Watching from the Sand by Juliana Lamy – I read the first 22% of this short fiction collection, which equated to a brief opener in the second person about a situation of abuse, followed by part of one endless-feeling story based around one apartment and bodega and featuring two young female family friends, one of whom accepts sexual favours in the supply closet from most male visitors. The voice and prose didn’t grab me, but of course I can’t say whether later stories would have been more to my taste. (Edelweiss)
Overall thoughts and prediction:
I’m grateful for the chance to have read most of the Carol Shields Prize longlist this year, thanks to the library, Edelweiss, and especially the publicist providing multiple books in digital format straight from the publishers. I’ve been introduced to a number of books and authors I might never have otherwise come across, and my reactions to what I expected to love or to dislike sometimes surprised me. It was also fun to do a few as buddy reads with Laura.
Here’s a recap of what I read, from favourite to least favourite:
Coleman Hill by Kim Coleman Foote – see above
Land of Milk and Honey by C Pam Zhang
Cocktail by Lisa Alward
I Have Some Questions for You by Rebecca Makkai (read last year)
Dances by Nicole Cuffy
Daughter by Claudia Dey
Chrysalis by Anuja Varghese
The Future by Catherine Leroux
Between Two Moons by Aisha Abdel Gawad – see above
Brotherless Night by V.V. Ganeshananthan (a skim)
A Council of Dolls by Mona Susan Power
You Were Watching from the Sand by Juliana Lamy (DNF) – see above
Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton (skimmed last year)
Loot by Tania James (skim/DNF)
Thus, my ideal shortlist would have been the top five: Coleman Hill, Land of Milk and Honey, Cocktail, I Have Some Questions for You, and Dances.
It’s impossible to predict what the judges will pick from the actual shortlist. I never even attempted one of the finalists (A History of Burning by Janika Oza – Marcie’s comments made me confident it wouldn’t be for me) and only skimmed two others (Catton and Ganeshananthan). Sod’s law would suggest that one of those few will therefore win! I could see the case for any of the five, anyway. But I will have my fingers crossed for Coleman Hill.
The winner will be announced on Monday, 13 May.
Will you seek out something from the shortlist (or longlist)?
Short Stories in September Roundup: Munro, Ulrich; Virago Anthology
This comes a few days later than I intended, but better late than never. I’ve been focusing on short stories in September for the last eight years. In September 2021 I read 12 short story collections; last year it was 11.5; this year I finished 11, so pretty much par for the course, and pushing my year-to-date total to 30 story collections – not bad going for someone who feels like she hardly ever reads stories and doesn’t seek them out. This year’s reviews are here, here and here.
Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage by Alice Munro (2001)
I always think I’ve never read Munro before, but that’s not the case. A decade or more ago I read Lives of Girls and Women. The ironic thing is that I chose it because I thought it was the odd one out in her oeuvre, being a novel rather than short stories. In fact, it’s a linked story collection, and really they might as well be discrete stories. That book left no impression, but I’d happened to accumulate several more Munro collections over the years and, especially after she won the Nobel, felt delinquent for not reading her.
There are nine stories in the 320-page volume, so the average story here is 30–35 pages – a little longer than I tend to like, but it allows Munro to fill in enough character detail that these feel like miniature novels; they certainly have all the emotional complexity. Her material is small-town Ontario and the shifts and surprises in marriages and dysfunctional families.
More commonly, she employs an omniscient third person to allow her to move between minds, yet I found that the three first-person stories were among the most memorable: in “Family Furnishings,” a woman recalls the encounter with her father’s cousin that made her resolve to be a writer; in “Nettles,” childhood friends meet again in midlife and a potential affair is quashed by the report of a tragedy; in “Queenie,” a young woman spends a short time living with her older stepsister and her husband, her music teacher she ran off with. This last one reminded me of Tessa Hadley’s stories – no doubt Munro has been an influence on many.
For instance, the title story, which opens the collection, gave me strong Elizabeth Hay and Mary Lawson vibes. A housekeeper sets off on the train to start a new life, encouraged by a romantic correspondence fabricated by her adolescent charge, Sabitha, and her friend. Munro pays close attention to domestic minutiae like furniture and clothing. Illness and death are frequent seeds of a story: cancer in “Floating Bridge,” the suicide of an ALS patient in “Comfort,” and dementia in the oft-anthologized “The Bear Came Over the Mountain.”
Individual plots are less likely to stay with me than the quality of the prose, the compassionate eye, and the feeling of being immersed in a novel-length narrative when really I was only halfway through a few dozen pages. I’ll certainly read more Munro collections. (Free from a neighbour) 
Close Company: Stories of Mothers and Daughters, ed. Christine Park and Caroline Heaton (1987)
Back in 2021, I read 14 of these 25 stories (reviewed here) and set the book aside. At that time I noted the repeated theme of women’s expectations of their daughters, and that was true of the remainder as well. The editors quote Simone de Beauvoir in the introduction, “the daughter is for the mother at once her double and another person.” So in Emily Prager’s “A Visit from the Footbinder,” Lady Guo Guo subjects her spirited daughter to the same painful procedure she underwent as a child. The cultural detail was overpowering in this one, like the author felt she had to prove she’d done her research on China. The father–daughter relationship struck me more in Judith Chernaik’s Jewish Brooklyn-set “Honor Thy Father and Thy Mother.”
From this batch, two stood out the most: in “Children’s Liberation” by Jan Clausen, Lisa rebels against her lesbian mother’s bohemian lifestyle by idolizing heterosexual love stories; and in Zhang Jie’s “Love Must Not Be Forgotten,” a daughter comes to understand her mother by reading her diary about her doomed romance. My overall favourites, though, were still the stories by Jane Gardam, Janet Frame, Alice Walker and Charlotte Perkins Gilman. (Free mall bookshop) 
Small, Burning Things by Cathy Ulrich (2023)
Ulrich’s second collection contains 50 flash fiction pieces, most of which were first published in literary magazines. She often uses the first-person plural and especially the second person; both “we” and “you” are effective ways of implicating the reader in the action. Her work is on a speculative spectrum ranging from magic realism to horror. Some of the situations are simply bizarre – teenagers fall from the sky like rain; a woman falls in love with a giraffe; the mad scientist next door replaces a girl’s body parts with robotic ones – while others are close enough to the real world to be terrifying. The dialogue is all in italics. Some images recur later in the collection: metamorphoses, spontaneous combustion. Adolescent girls and animals are omnipresent. At a certain point this started to feel repetitive and overlong, but in general I appreciated the inventiveness.
Published on 2 July by Okay Donkey Press. With thanks to publicist Lori Hettler for the free e-copy for review.
I also read the first two stories in The Best Short Stories 2023: The O. Henry Prize Winners, edited by Lauren Groff. If these selections by Ling Ma and Catherine Lacey are anything to go by, Groff’s taste is for gently magical stories where hints of the absurd or explained enter into everyday life. Ma’s “Office Hours” has academics passing through closet doors into a dream space; the title of Lacey’s “Man Mountain” is literal. I’ll try to remember to occasionally open the book on my e-reader to get through the rest.
Short Stories in September, Part II: Andreades, Ferris, Fliss and Mulvey
It’s my aim to read as many short story collections as possible in September. After a first three earlier in the month, here are my next four.
Brown Girls by Daphne Palasi Andreades (2022)
It was Susan’s review that first enticed me to read this linked story collection. I’m always intrigued by the use of the first-person plural, though it can have downsides – in trying to be inclusive of the breadth of experiences of the “us,” the content can edge toward generic. I worried things were going that way in the early chapters about girlhood “in the dregs of Queens, New York,” but the more I read the more I admired Andreades’s debut. Each chapter is a fantastic thematic fragment adding up to a glistening mosaic of what it means to be a woman of colour in the USA. Desires and ambitions shift as they move from childhood to adolescence to college years to young adulthood, but some things stay the same: their parents’ high expectations, the pull of various cultures, and near-daily microaggressions.
Our families’ legacies, the histories we’ve inherited: grandparents who never learned to read, U.S.-backed dictatorships, bombs, wars, refugee camps, naval bases, canals, gold, diamonds, oil, missionaries, brain drain, the American Dream.
No matter their zip code or tax bracket, listen as these white people deem us and our families the good immigrants, the hard-working ones—not like the lazy people in this country who are a burden on the system.
The fulcrum is the sudden death of one of their number, Trish, which has repercussions through the second half of the book. It raises questions of mental health and whether friendships will last even when they move beyond Queens.
I especially loved Part Five, about a trip back to the motherland that leaves the brown girls disoriented from simultaneous sensations of connection, privilege and foreignness. “The colonized, the colonizer. Where do we fall?” My individual favourite chapters were “Duty,” about giving up on parentally prescribed medical studies to pursue a passion for art; “Patriotic,” about deciding whether or not to have children; and “Our Not-Reflections,” about age allowing them to understand what their mothers went through when they were new to the country. One critique: I would have omitted the final Part Eight, which is about Covid and death in general; the book didn’t need an update to feel timely. It’s a shame this wasn’t at least longlisted for the Women’s Prize this past year. (New purchase with a book token)
The Dinner Party by Joshua Ferris (2017)
I’ve read a couple of Ferris’s novels but this collection had passed me by. “More Abandon (Or Whatever Happened to Joe Pope?)” is set in the same office building as Then We Came to the End. Most of the entries take place in New York City or Chicago, with “Life in the Heart of the Dead” standing out for its Prague setting. The title story, which opens the book, sets the tone: bristly, gloomy, urbane, a little bit absurd. A couple are expecting their friends to arrive for dinner any moment, but the evening wears away and they never turn up. The husband decides to go over there and give them a piece of his mind, only to find that they’re hosting their own party. The betrayal only draws attention to the underlying unrest in the original couple’s marriage. “Why do I have this life?” the wife asks towards the close.
Marital discontent and/or infidelity is a recurring feature, showing up in “A Night Out” and “The Breeze,” which presents the different ways a couple’s evening might have gone. I liked this line about the difficulty of overcoming incompatibilities: “Why could she not be more like him and why could he not be more like her?” It seems from my short story reading that there is always one story I would give a different title. Here I would rename “The Valetudinarian” (about a Florida retiree who ends up in a comical health crisis) “They don’t give you a manual” after his repeated catchphrase.
A few of the 11 stories weren’t so memorable, but the collection ends with a bang. “A Fair Price” appears to have a typically feeble male protagonist, frustrated that the man he’s hired to help move his belongings out of a storage unit is so taciturn, but the innocuous setup hides a horrific potential. (Public library)
The Predatory Animal Ball by Jennifer Fliss (2021)
These 40 flash fiction stories try on a dizzying array of genres and situations. They vary in length from a paragraph (e.g., “Pigeons”) to 5–8 pages, and range from historical to dystopian. A couple of stories are in the second person (“Dandelions” was a standout) and a few in the first-person plural. Some have unusual POV characters. “A Greater Folly Is Hard to Imagine,” whose name comes from a William Morris letter, seems like a riff on “The Yellow Wallpaper,” but with the very wall décor to blame. “Degrees” and “The Thick Green Ribbon” are terrifying/amazing for how quickly things go from fine to apocalyptically bad.
Grief and especially pregnancy loss are repeated elements. In “Yolk,” a woman finds a chicken embryo inside a cracked egg and it brings back memories of her recent stillbirth. In “All Your Household Needs,” a bereaved voice-over artist sympathizes with a child who picks up a stuffed Lucky the Dog whose speech she recorded. In “What Goes with Us,” an unreturned library book is a treasured reminder of a dead partner; “May His Memory Be a Blessing” lists many other such mementoes. Even the title story, whose main character is a mouse, opens with the loss of a loved one and posits compassion from an unexpected source.
It’s hard to get a sense of an author’s overall style from such disparate material, so I was pleased to learn that Fliss is working on her first novel, which I’ll be keen to read.
With thanks to publicist Lori Hettler for the e-copy for review.
Hearts & Bones: Love Songs for Late Youth by Niamh Mulvey (2022)
Having read these 10 stories over the course of a few months, I now struggle to remember what many of them were about. If there’s an overarching theme, it’s (young) women’s relationships. “My First Marina,” about a teenager discovering her sexual power and the potential danger of peer pressure in a friendship, is similar to the title story of Milk Blood Heat by Dantiel W. Moniz. In “Mother’s Day,” a woman hopes that a pregnancy will prompt a reconciliation between her and her estranged mother. In “Childcare,” a girl and her grandmother join forces against the mum/daughter, a would-be actress. “Currency” is in the second person, with the rest fairly equally split between first and third person. “The Doll” is an odd one about a ventriloquist’s dummy and repeats events from three perspectives.
I had two favourites: “Feathers” and “Good for You, Cecilia.” In the former, a woman rethinks her relationship with her boyfriend when the 2010 volcanic eruption restricts her to his French flat and she gets chatting with his cleaner. In the latter, a mother and daughter go to watch their daughter/sister’s dance recital in Dublin and witness the fall of a statue of St. Cecilia in a church they stop into. These are all matter-of-fact, somewhat detached stories set in European cities over the last decade or so. None of the protagonists had me particularly emotionally engaged with their plights. Overall, this felt reminiscent of Wendy Erskine’s work (I’ve reviewed Dance Move), but not as original or powerful.
With thanks to Picador for the proof copy for review.
Currently reading: Ms. Hempel Chronicles by Sarah Shun-lien Bynum, Delicate Edible Birds by Lauren Groff, Playing Sardines by Michèle Roberts
Up next: The High Places by Fiona McFarlane, Birds of America by Lorrie Moore
Review and Q&A: Those Fantastic Lives by Bradley Sides
Bradley Sides and I worked together on Bookkaholic web magazine in 2014–15 and I’ve been following his career ever since. I was delighted to get early access to his debut short story collection, Those Fantastic Lives (out today from Blacklight Press), which was an ideal transition for me from September’s short story focus to October’s R.I.P. challenge for how it blends the genres of dystopia, horror, and magic realism with literary writing.
Many of the protagonists in these 17 stories are orphans or children who have lost one parent. Grief uproots them, leaves them questing; combine their loneliness with dashes of the supernatural and you have perfect situations for strange and wonderful things to happen. So in the title story we have Sam, who at eight longs to follow in his psychic grandmother’s footsteps. In the achingly beautiful “Dolls for the End of the World,” young Patrick’s empathy somehow makes the apocalypse more bearable. In “The Hunt,” 10-year-old Zoey is obsessed with finding a sasquatch, while “In the Hollow” Walt trusts wolf-like creatures to lead him to his dead mother.
“Commencement,” in a first-person plural voice, is the creepiest of the lot, documenting preparations for graduation at a special academy. To be named the class valedictorian is an enduring yet dubious honor… But there are flashes of humor in the book as well. For instance, the lighthearted werewolf story “A Complicated Correspondence” is told via a series of increasingly convoluted e-mails. These two and “Back in Crowville,” in which scarecrows are used to scare off ghosts, too, struck me as perfect Halloween reading. I’d particularly recommend the book to readers of Kelly Link and Lydia Millet.
Brad and I had a chat over e-mail about his inspiration, themes and publication process.
Can you remember what the seed was for some of these stories? A particular line, scene, image, or character? Do you start writing a story with a title in mind, or does the title usually suggest itself later on?
Almost all of the stories I write come to me initially as a vision. I don’t mean in a dream or anything that dramatic, but I might be walking and see a stream, and suddenly that stream is placed in another world, and the stakes are much, much higher. Once I see my characters or my setting or my situation, I have to write a story that leads up to the moment I’m seeing. Writing and creating is, for me, a very internalized process.
Titles are so hard for me. I wish this weren’t the case, but I never write with titles in mind. Sometimes I’ll have the story ready, and I might have to wait weeks before I come to the right title. In regards to writing, I think I’m the worst at titling.
I think my favorite line in the book might be “Just because something can’t be seen doesn’t mean that it’s gone.” That’s from “The Comet Seekers,” about a pair of brothers in search of their father. A number of the stories feature children who have lost a guardian. How does bereavement alter the course of these coming-of-age narratives?
I’m so interested in loss in general. In life, we lose things. As kids. As adults. It doesn’t stop. I grew up on a farm, and animals died constantly. Chickens were slaughtered by foxes. Ducks were killed on their nests by turtles. Cows were sold and slaughtered. Pets died. Loss was everywhere. I’ve always thought about it. I guess, in many ways, loss haunts me.
I feel like bereavement and orphanhood create tension in many of my stories, but they also serve to add stakes to my characters’ lives. It’s tough to keep losing. Sometimes, you’ll do anything to keep from experiencing that—or to try to keep from experiencing that, at least. There’s power there.
I imagine that, like sequencing an album, choosing the order of the stories was a pleasurable challenge. How did you decide on the structure of the book – the opening story, the closing story; the themes running into or contrasting with each other; transitions; and so on?
It was a fun process to start putting all of my work together. I mean, it was also a little stressful once I got near the end and was getting ready to send Those Fantastic Lives out, but it was still fun. I have written a lot of stories, but for my collection, I wanted to only include the stories I love the most. I cut and cut based on just pure writerly love first—and gut instinct, I suppose. Once I had it narrowed, I started looking closely at themes. I removed a handful that felt like they didn’t belong. I really like slim collections (and slim books in general), so I wanted something relatively short—something less than 200 pages. The strangest thing I did was that I read the collection aloud. SEVERAL times, too. If a story didn’t fit the sound, I cut it. I really wanted to put out a cohesive collection, and I think (hope?) I’ve done that with these seventeen stories.
I loved how elements recurred in later tales – for instance, in both “Losing Light” and “The Mooneaters” characters consume sources of light and glow from the inside, and “What They Left Behind” connects back to “The Mooneaters” in that a character starts to sprout feathers. How do you account for these pervasive images?
This is probably a terrible response to such a great question, but it’s the truth: I look at the sky a lot. As in, probably way beyond what is normal. When I walk my dog, I look up at the morning sky and think about the clouds and the rising sun. When my wife and I are out on the porch in the evenings, I look up and think about the approaching stars. The coming moon. Whether early or late, the birds are always around, flying to wherever it is they go. I am so amazed by and curious of the sky. It’s such a beautiful, mysterious place that hovers above us, and it’s kind of the perfect space for me to root a lot of the fantastical elements of my stories.
In my favorite story, “The Galactic Healers,” Lian makes contact with aliens who offer a therapeutic balm. His suspicious father takes the medicine by force – a plan that quickly backfires. To what extent might this one be read as a parable of colonial exploitation and toxic masculinity?
I’m so glad you liked “The Galactic Healers,” Rebecca. It is one of my favorites, too. I’m naturally drawn, just as a human and not even necessarily speaking as a writer, to the topics you mention. I think about otherness. What it means to be outside or different. In that same way, I think about tender versus toxic behavior. I think the reading you have of the story is definitely a good one. And it probably captures where I was, in my head, at that time.
I sensed shades of Karen Russell and George Saunders. Who are some of your favorite writers, and who would you cite as inspirations for the collection?
I love Karen Russell and George Saunders both. I’m honored that my work reminds you of their writing. I think they are both influences on my fiction. I’m also inspired by Ray Bradbury a lot. I’m a very visual creator, so television writers also serve as huge inspirations for me. Mike Flanagan’s work (The Haunting of Hill House and The Haunting of Bly Manor) haunts me, and I love it.
Bradley Sides. Photo by Abraham Rowe.
Versions of 12 of the stories previously appeared in various publications. What has your experience been of getting your work into literary magazines?
Getting published in literary magazines is an exhausting process. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a necessary one and one that gives me a lot of joy in the long run, but it’s also tough. I write weird stuff. Not every magazine wants a story about glowing monsters or a tiny kid whose home planet was invaded by giants and now lives on an ice cube. Finding the right magazine takes time, and even when I think I’ve found the right place, I’m sometimes wrong. I submit, hope for the best, and keep submitting. Usually, most of my stories wind up finding homes in the first five or so magazines I submit them to, but that’s not always the case. With “What They Left Behind,” for example, I bet I sent that story to twenty or thirty magazines before I found the perfect match at Crow & Cross Keys. Although it took some time to land at its home, it found its PERFECT home.
These stories were seven years in the making. What was your road to publication like, and how did you land at Blacklight Press?
Like many yet-to-publish-a-book writers, I was constantly searching for publication information as I was reaching the end of my writing cycle for Those Fantastic Lives, and I kept encountering these articles about how long and tough the publication process can be. I was prepared for it to take years before I found a press willing to take on my collection.
Once it was ready, I sent Those Fantastic Lives out to a handful of publishers—all of which I’d found out about with basic web searches. A couple were interested, but the offer wasn’t what I was looking for. A couple showed interest, but ultimately passed. Blacklight landed, and I knew it was what I was looking for very early on.
The process of when I began to when I found my publisher was probably less than six months.
The whole team at Blacklight has been fantastic, too. It’s really been a dream experience. I feel very grateful.
In your day job, you teach English and creative writing to high schoolers. What are some of the most important lessons you hope your students will take away from your classes, and what have you learned from them?
I hope, more than anything, that my students learn that their words—and their stories—matter. If they truly put themselves into their work, it is art, and it is important. I also hope they leave my classroom knowing how important respect is. To other writers. To themselves. To their eventual readers. To people in general. Respect is key.
I’ve learned so much from my creative writing students. They inspire me. They motivate me. Seeing their excitement when they write something they are proud of reminds me why I write in the first place. They are also wonderfully eager readers. I love discussing stories with them and learning how they perceive texts. Creative writing classes are treasured places.
What are you working on next?
Earlier this year, I began working on my next set of stories. I’m a slow writer. Maybe a very slow writer. With it being so early in the process, it’s hard to say exactly what the next collection will look like, but I do think I’ll largely stay focused on the same kinds of themes. Loss, loneliness, and transformation are naturally interesting to me. There’ll be more experimentation with form. A story in the shape of a manual. A gameplay story. A transcript. A flash in questions. There’ll be plenty of magical weirdness, too, with, probably, pond monsters, apocalypses, a shark boy, kidnapping ghosts, and who knows what else. I just hope it won’t take me so long to write this second book!
Three on a Theme for Mother’s Day
In advance of (American) Mother’s Day, I picked up two novels and a set of short stories that explore the bonds between mothers and their children, especially daughters. The relationships can be fraught or fractured, but always provide good fodder for psychologically astute fiction.
Mother for Dinner by Shalom Auslander (2020)
Hope: A Tragedy, Auslander’s 2012 debut, is among my absolute favorites, an outrageously funny novel that imagines Anne Frank is alive and dwelling in a suburban attic, frantically tapping out her endless magnum opus. Solomon Kugel, the sap blessed to have an icon sharing his home, has a deluded mother who actually grew up in Brooklyn but believes she survived the Holocaust and now hoards food and curses the Nazis who ruined her life.
I start with that bit of synopsis because Mother for Dinner showcases rather analogous situations and attitudes, but ultimately didn’t come together as successfully for me. It’s a satire on the immigrant and minority experience in the USA – the American dream of ‘melting pot’ assimilation that we see contradicted daily by tribalism and consumerism. Seventh Seltzer works in Manhattan publishing and has to vet identity stories vying to be the next Great American Novel: “The Heroin-Addicted-Autistic-Christian-American-Diabetic one” and “the Gender-Neutral-Albino-Lebanese-Eritrean-American” one are two examples. But Seventh is a would-be writer himself, compelled to tell the Cannibal-American story.
For years Mudd, the Seltzer family matriarch, has been eating Whoppers for each meal in a customary fattening-up called the Cornucopiacation. She expects her 12 children, who are likely the last of the Cannibal kind, to carry on the tradition of eating her corpse after her death. It’s a way for ancestors to live on in their descendents. The Cannibal Guide, disguised as a deer processing manual, sets out the steps: Drain (within two hours), Purge, Partition, Consume (within 24 hours). Unclish, the Seltzers’ uncle, drilled the rules into them when they were kids through rhymes like “A bite and half / and you won’t need another, / whether it’s your father, your sister, / or even your mother.” From her deathbed, Mudd apportions her body parts to her offspring, some tenderly and some vengefully. Their inheritance – a Brooklyn dump that will still net $5.2 million – is conditional on them performing the ritual.
Interspersed with sections on the practicalities of butchering and cooking a morbidly obese woman are flashbacks to key moments of Cannibal history, which has turned into myth. In 1914, Julius Seltzer left the paradisiacal “Old Country” with his sister Julia, who pretended to be his wife and traveled with him to Detroit to work for Henry Ford. (An overt parody of Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex.) Mudd is vocally intolerant of all other minority groups, from Blacks to homosexuals, and always chooses the version of history that reflects best on her own ancestors, while the Seltzers’ father was more willing to admit flaws.
My proof copy, with a joke on the cover, came with a napkin!
Auslander is pushing the boundary of what an author can get away with, not just with a literal cannibalism storyline but also with jokes about historical atrocities and the recent trend for outing beloved figures as reprehensible (what Seventh calls “Contemporary Assholization Studies”). He shares Lionel Shriver’s glee for tipping sacred cows. I did appreciate his picture of the pervasiveness of xenophobia – the “You’re Not Me” look that anyone can get when walking in an unfamiliar neighborhood – and his willingness to question the value of beliefs and ceremonies once they’ve stopped being reasonable or of use. But with all the siblings known by numbers, it’s hard to distinguish between them. The novel ends up heavy on ideas but light on characterization, and as a whole it leaves a bit of a bad taste in the mouth.
My rating:
With thanks to Picador for the proof copy for review.
The Mothers by Brit Bennett (2016)
{CONTAINS MILD SPOILERS.}
Like so many who were impressed with the Women’s Prize-shortlisted The Vanishing Half, I rushed to get hold of Bennett’s California-set first novel, which, while not as skillfully put together, is nearly as emotionally engaging. After her mother’s suicide, 17-year-old Nadia Turner only has her father, a Marine, but they are bolstered by their church family at Upper Room Chapel. Nadia is a bright girl headed to Michigan for college, but in her senior year she gets mixed up with Pastor Sheppard’s 21-year-old son, Luke, leading to a pregnancy and abortion that his parents swiftly cover up / pay for. Luke drops her at the clinic and hands over the money, but doesn’t pick her up; that looks the acrimonious end of their relationship.
But in the years to come, especially when Nadia takes a break from law school to care for her father, their lives will intersect again. Nadia’s best friend in that final year of high school was Aubrey Evans, who is estranged from her mother, who failed to protect the girl from sexual abuse at the hands of her own boyfriend. Now Aubrey wears a purity ring, enamored with the idea that faith will make her clean again. Once Nadia leaves, she starts dating Luke, ignorant of her best friend’s history with him. This sets up a love triangle mired in layers of secrets.
There is dramatic irony here between what the characters know about each other and what we, the readers, know – echoed by what “we,” the church Mothers, observe in the first-person plural sections that open most chapters. I love the use of a Greek chorus to comment on a novel’s action, and The Mothers reminded me of the elderly widows in the Black church I grew up attending. (I watched the video of a wedding that took place there early this month and there they were, perched on aisle seats in their prim purple suits and matching hats.)
Nadia and Aubrey are relatable characters, and Luke earns our sympathy after the cruel return of his football injury. (I was intrigued to see that Peter Ho Davies was one of Bennett’s teachers – his novel A Lie Someone Told You About Yourself is a rare picture of male grief after abortion, also present here.) Bennett explores multiple facets of motherhood: memories of a mother, the absence of a mother, the choice to become a mother, and people who act in the place of a mother by providing physical care or being a source of moral support.
The timeline is a bit too long, which makes the plot wander more than it needs to, but this is a warm and bittersweet novel that always held my interest. Bennett has produced two winners in a row, and I look forward to seeing what she’ll do next.
A favorite line: “Maybe mothers were inherently vast and unknowable.” (not literally vast like in the Auslander!)
Source: Birthday gift (secondhand) from my wishlist last year
My rating:
Close Company: Stories of Mothers and Daughters, ed. by Christine Park and Caroline Heaton (1987)
I read 14 of 25 stories, skipping to the ones that most interested me (by familiar names like Sue Miller, Sylvia Plath, and Jeanette Winterson), and will read the rest next year. The only story I’d encountered before was Margaret Atwood’s “Significant Moments in the Life of My Mother,” originally published in Bluebeard’s Egg. The title phrase comes from Jamaica Kincaid’s story. A recurring theme is women’s expectations for their daughters, who might repeat or reject their own experiences. As the editors quote from Simone de Beauvoir in the introduction, “the daughter is for the mother at once her double and another person.”
I particularly liked “The Pangs of Love” by Jane Gardam, a retelling of the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale of “The Little Mermaid,” and “Swans” by Janet Frame, in which a mother takes her two little girls for a cheeky weekday trip to the beach. Fay and Totty are dismayed to learn that their mother is fallible: she chose the wrong beach, one without amenities, and can’t guarantee that all will be well on their return. A dusky lagoon full of black swans is an alluring image of peace, quickly negated by the unpleasant scene that greets them at home.
Two overall standouts thus far were “Everyday Use” by Alice Walker and “The Unnatural Mother” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. In Walker’s story, which draws on the parable of the Prodigal Son, a hip Afro-wearing daughter returns to her mother’s rural home and covets the quilts and butter churn – to her this is quaint folk art that she wants to take away and display, but her mother and sister resent her condescension towards their ‘backward’ lives.
Gilman is best known for The Yellow Wallpaper, but this story has a neat connection with another classic work: the main character is named Esther Greenwood, which is also the protagonist’s name in Plath’s The Bell Jar (consider this a preview of my next Book Serendipity roundup!). A gossiping gaggle of women discuss Esther’s feral upbringing and blame it for her prioritizing altruism over her duty to her child. A perfect story.
Source: Free mall bookshop
My rating: (so far) 
If you read just one … Make it The Mothers. (But do also pick out at least a few stories from the Close Company anthology.)
Recent Writing for BookBrowse, Shiny New Books and the TLS
A peek at the bylines I’ve had elsewhere so far this year.
BookBrowse
A Good Neighborhood by Therese Anne Fowler: In Fowler’s sixth novel, issues of race and privilege undermine a teen romance and lead to tragedy in a seemingly idyllic North Carolina neighborhood. A Good Neighborhood is an up-to-the-minute story packed with complex issues including celebrity culture, casual racism, sexual exploitation, and environmental degradation. It is narrated in a first-person plural voice, much like the Greek chorus of a classical tragedy. If you loved Tayari Jones’s An American Marriage, this needs to be next on your to-read list. It is a book that will make you think, and a book that will make you angry; I recommend it to socially engaged readers and book clubs alike. 
Pew by Catherine Lacey: Lacey’s third novel is a mysterious fable about a stranger showing up in a Southern town in the week before an annual ritual. Pew’s narrator, homeless, mute and amnesiac, wakes up one Sunday in the middle of a church service, observing everything like an alien anthropologist. The stranger’s gender, race, and age are entirely unclear, so the Reverend suggests the name “Pew”. The drama over deciphering Pew’s identity plays out against the preparations for the enigmatic Forgiveness Festival and increasing unrest over racially motivated disappearances. Troubling but strangely compelling; recommended to fans of Shirley Jackson and Flannery O’Connor. [U.S. publication pushed back to July 21st]
Shiny New Books
Losing Eden: Why Our Minds Need the Wild by Lucy Jones: While nature’s positive effect on human mental health is something we know intuitively and can explain anecdotally, Jones was determined to investigate the scientific mechanism behind it. She set out to make an empirical enquiry and discovered plenty of evidence in the scientific literature, but also attests to the personal benefits that nature has for her and explores the spiritual connection that many have found. Losing Eden is full of both common sense and passion, cramming masses of information into 200 pages yet never losing sight of the big picture. Just as Silent Spring led to real societal change, let’s hope Jones’s work inspires steps in the right direction.
[+ Reviews of 4 more Wainwright Prize (for nature writing) longlistees on the way!]
The Bass Rock by Evie Wyld: While it ranges across the centuries, the novel always sticks close to the title location. Just as the louring rock is inescapable in the distance if you look out from the Edinburgh hills, there’s no avoiding violence for the women and children of the novel. It’s a sobering theme, certainly, but Wyld convinced me that hers is an accurate vision and a necessary mission. The novel cycles through its three strands in an ebb and flow pattern that seems appropriate to the coastal setting and creates a sense of time’s fluidity. The best 2020 novel I’ve read, memorable for its elegant, time-blending structure as well as its unrelenting course – and set against that perfect backdrop of an indifferent monolith.
Times Literary Supplement
I Am an Island by Tamsin Calidas: A record of a demoralizing journey into extreme loneliness on a Scottish island, this offers slivers of hope that mystical connection with the natural world can restore a sense of self. In places the narrative is a litany of tragedies and bad news. The story’s cathartic potential relies on its audience’s willingness to stick with a book that can be – to be blunt –depressing. The writing often tends towards the poetic, but is occasionally marred by platitudes and New Age sentiments. As with Educated, it’s impossible not to marvel at all the author has survived. Admiring Calidas’s toughness, though, doesn’t preclude relief at reaching the final page. (Full review in May 29th issue.) 
We Swim to the Shark: Overcoming fear one fish at a time by Georgie Codd: Codd’s offbeat debut memoir chronicles her quest to conquer a phobia of sea creatures. Inspired by a friend’s experience of cognitive behavioral therapy to cure arachnophobia, she crafted a program of controlled exposure. She learned to scuba dive before a trip to New Zealand, returning via Thailand with an ultimate challenge in mind: her quarry was the whale shark, a creature even Jacques Cousteau only managed to sight twice. The book has a jolly, self-deprecating tone despite its exploration of danger and dread. A more directionless second half leads to diminished curiosity about whether that elusive whale shark will make an appearance. (Full review in a forthcoming issue.)
Dottoressa: An American Doctor in Rome by Susan Levenstein: In the late 1970s, Levenstein moved from New York City to Rome with her Italian husband and set up a private medical practice catering to English-speaking expatriates. Her light-hearted yet trenchant memoir highlights the myriad contrasts between the United States and Italy revealed by their health care systems. Italy has a generous national health service, but it is perennially underfunded and plagued by corruption and inefficiency. The tone is conversational and even-handed. In the pandemic aftermath, though, Italian sloppiness and shortages no longer seem like harmless matters to shake one’s head over. (Full review coming up in June 19th issue.)
Do any of these books (all by women, coincidentally) interest you?
The Secrets We Kept by Lara Prescott Blog Tour
“this was not just a book, but a weapon”
It’s the latest Reese Witherspoon book club selection and film rights have been sold to the producers of La La Land; if you haven’t already heard about The Secrets We Kept, you’ll be hearing a lot more soon. Prescott’s debut novel is an offbeat spy thriller set mostly in the 1950s and based on the international reception of Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago. Considered to express anti-Soviet opinions, Pasternak’s love story is suppressed in his native country but published widely in Western Europe and further afield. The Central Intelligence Agency, in the belief that books are one way to change ideologies in the long term (“They had their satellites, but we had their books”), decides it is important to make Doctor Zhivago available in its original Russian in the motherland, and duly enrolls two female spies – who have been masquerading as a typist and a receptionist – in the scheme.
First-person narration duties are shared by Olga Vsevolodovna, Pasternak’s lover and the inspiration for Lara in Doctor Zhivago; Irina Drozdova, a new secretary at the Agency; Sally Forrester, the more experienced spy who takes Irina under her wing; Teddy Helms, Irina’s first trainer and would-be romantic interest; and the typist pool as a whole. I have a special love for the first-person plural voice, used as a kind of observant chorus. Here it doesn’t work perfectly: Chapter 17 unnecessarily recaps information readers had already gleaned, while Chapter 20 is a clunky way of revealing more. But the ‘we’ of the title is not just these all-seeing typists (who reminded me of the secretaries in Mad Men), but also Sally and Irina, as well as Olga and her family, who often suffer for their connection with Pasternak. The epilogue carries things through to the present in a hopeful, almost whimsical way.
There’s a lot to appreciate about The Secrets We Kept, including the prominent roles played by women, the surprising place given to a same-sex relationship, and the glimpses into publishing and literary history. Prescott might have included more about Doctor Zhivago itself, though. The plot will most likely be unfamiliar to today’s readers. (I saw the film nearly 20 years ago and remember nothing.) Including more passages and some careful plot summary might have tempted more readers to try Pasternak’s work as we approach the 60th anniversary of his death in 2020. Still, this is in a very easy-reading style that lends itself to binges, and it nicely bridges the gap between literary fiction and spy stories.
Recommended to: Readers of Jessie Burton and Whitney Scharer; viewers of The Americans.
My rating:
The Secrets We Kept was published by Hutchinson on September 3rd. My thanks to the publisher for the proof copy for review.
The Lucky Ones by Julianne Pachico
Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award shortlist review #3
If you’ve been following the shadow panel’s progress on Twitter, you’ll know that we’re all extremely impressed with this one. Marketed as a novel in America but as a short story collection here in the UK, The Lucky Ones is really somewhere in between: it’s a linked story collection in which the 11 chapters could stand alone but are so much richer together. Each generally adds a layer of meaning to the others by filling in the background or following a certain character a decade or more into the future. The book keeps creeping backward and leaping forward to show how terror endured in one’s past never really goes away.
The title certainly seems ironic, as many of the schoolmates, teachers and hangers-on who people these Colombia-set stories face imprisonment, torture or disappearance. The story titles, too, seem innocuous, even sweet. But the first story, “Lucky,” sets the precedent for things turning very dark very fast. Stephanie Lansky’s family leaves for a weekend party at the Montoyas’ country house, but teenage Stephanie stays home, planning to smoke in secret and meet up with a friend at the mall. Scary snatches of radio dialogue about Communist rebels and bombs contrast with her escapist re-reading of Arthurian romances, but the threat becomes real when a man comes to the door to get her. With the maid missing and her parents not answering their phones, she’s effectively a hostage in her own home. The open-ended conclusion is masterly; its “could be,” “maybe” and “It’s still possible” phrases leave the reader to wonder whether Stephanie will be one of the lucky ones or not.
The stories range from 1993 to 2013, and over those two decades we zoom in and out to visit some of Stephanie’s classmates and teachers. For instance, in “Lemon Pie,” my favorite individual story, her teacher, Mr. B., is now a prisoner in a jungle camp and nourishes what little sanity he has left by teaching his old Hamlet lesson plans to groups of leaves and sticks. In the next story, “M + M,” we meet another of Mr. B.’s pupils, a scholarship student who fell out spectacularly with a friend over their differing class status. Ten years later, he’s a guerrilla commander so harsh that he orders deserters executed by their friends.
Seven of the stories are in the third person, but others add in some interesting variety: in “Siberian Tiger Park,” the third graders of Stephanie’s class form a first-person plural voice as they set their vivid imaginations loose on the playground and turn against their former ringleader, and “The Bird Thing,” a slice of horror in which a maid’s traumatic memories feed a monster, is told in the second person. And then there’s “Junkie Rabbit,” a first-person story set among a coca-consuming colony of pet rabbits gone feral. It’s Watership Down on speed. Indeed, drug use and wildness are recurring tropes, and there’s a hallucinatory quality to these stories – somewhere between languid and frantic – that suits the subject matter.
Before starting this I knew nothing about the relatively recent conflict in Colombia. It’s estimated that there were 60,000 forced disappearances on top of the documented carnage. We meet one character who has his hand chopped off for “publishing the wrong kind of articles,” but the country’s atrocities usually show up in asides, woven in so subtly and elegantly that they’re among the most arresting passages in the book:
On Saturdays … you got to run to the riverside, slide down the bank, and go swimming or throw stones or try to catch tiny silver fish with your bare hands, then feed them leftovers from lunch. Except when the bodies were floating in the water. Rumor was that men always floated face up, women face down. Sometimes there were vultures sitting on them and sometimes not. But if there were bodies, you would just go to the little stream instead and that was better. There the fish would eat rice straight from your hand, grains floating through the water like confetti thrown at a wedding.
Almost every story has at least one paragraph that striking. I thought two stories added less than the others and might have been cut to get the page count down closer to 200, but for the originality of the setup and the sheer excellence of the writing this book can’t be topped.
More shadow panel reviews of The Lucky Ones:
Annabel’s at Annabookbel
Clare’s at A Little Blog of Books
Dane’s at Social Book Shelves
Eleanor’s at Elle Thinks
Review: Hillbilly Elegy by J.D. Vance
“Americans call them hillbillies, rednecks, or white trash. I call them neighbors, friends, and family.”
This is one of those books I’d heard high praise about from America but never thought I’d be able to get hold of in the UK. I looked into borrowing it from the public library on my last trip to the States, but even nearly a year after its publication the reservation list was still a mile long. So I was delighted to hear that Hillbilly Elegy was being released in paperback in the UK last month. For British readers, it will provide a welcome window onto a working-class world that is easily caricatured but harder to understand in a nuanced way.
J.D. Vance knows hillbilly America from the inside but also has the necessary distance to be able to draw helpful conclusions about it: born in the “Rust Belt” of Ohio to parents who didn’t complete high school, he served in the Marine Corps in Iraq, attended Ohio State University and Yale Law School, and became a successful investor with a venture capital firm. He was one of the lucky ones who didn’t give into lower-middle-class despair and widespread vices like alcoholism and hard drugs, even though his mother was an addict and installed a “revolving door of father figures” in his life after his father abandoned them.
Vance attributes his success to the stability provided by his grandparents, his beloved Mamaw and Papaw. They were part of a large wave of migration from Kentucky to Ohio, where they moved so Papaw could work in the Armco Steel mill. Prejudice assaulted the couple from both sides: Kentucky folk thought they’d grown too big for their britches, while in Ohio they were maligned as dirty hillbillies. Mamaw, in particular, is a wonderful character so eccentric you couldn’t make her up, with her fierce love backed up by a pistol.
The book is powerful because it gives concrete, personal examples of social movements: it’s no dry history of how the Scots-Irish residents of Appalachia switched allegiance from the Democratic Party to the Republican after Richard Nixon, though Vance does fill in these broad brushstrokes, but a family memoir that situates Mamaw and Papaw’s experience, and later his own, in the context of the history of the region and the whole country.
I most appreciated the author’s determined use of the first-person plural, especially later in the book: he includes himself in the hillbilly “we” such that he’s not some newly gentrified snob denouncing welfare queens: he knows these people and this lifestyle and recognizes its contradictions; he also knows that but for the grace of God he could have slipped into the same bad habits.
Jackson [Kentucky] is undoubtedly full of the nicest people in the world; it is also full of drug addicts and at least one man who can find the time to make eight children but can’t find the time to support them. It is unquestionably beautiful, but its beauty is obscured by the environmental waste and loose trash that scatters the countryside. Its people are hardworking, except of course for the many food stamp recipients who show little interest in honest work.
At Yale Law School Vance felt out of place for the first time in his life. One of the most important things he learned from professors like Amy Chua was the value of social capital: in his new world of lawyers, senators and judges it really was all about who you know. At law firm interviews, he had no idea what cutlery to use in restaurants and had to text his girlfriend for help. For as much as he’s adapted to non-hillbilly life in the intervening years, he still notices in himself the hallmarks of a stressful, impoverished upbringing: a fight or flight approach to conflict and an honor culture that makes him prone to nurturing feuds.
Although I enjoyed it simply as a memoir, I can see this book especially appealing to people who are interested in the politics and psychology of the lower middle class (perhaps an American equivalent to Owen Jones’s Chavs, a book I never got through). British readers will, I think, be surprised to learn that Vance is on the conservative end of the spectrum and has political aspirations. Essentially, he doesn’t think the government can fix things for struggling country folk, though certain social policies might help. He seems to think it’s more a question of personal responsibility – and also that churches have a major role to play.
There is a cultural movement in the white working class to blame problems on society or the government, and that movement gains adherents by the day.
Mamaw always had two gods: Jesus Christ and the United States of America. I was no different, and neither was anyone else I knew.
(These strike me as alien ideas in the UK, apart from short-lived strategies like David Cameron’s “Big Society” – except, perhaps, if one goes all the way back to Thatcherism.)
Much has been made in the British press about this book’s ability to explain the rise of Donald Trump. This is an overstatement, and perhaps even misleading, when you consider the author’s conservatism; he never mentions Trump, and never engages in any specific political discussions. But what it is helpful for is exposing a mindset of rugged, defiant individualism that often shades into hopelessness. I have my own share of redneck relatives, and though I feel far removed from the world Vance depicts, I can see its traces in my family tree. I’m glad he had the guts to draw on his experience and write this hard-hitting book.
My rating:
Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis was first published in the UK by William Collins in September 2016. My thanks to Katherine Patrick for sending a free paperback for review.
Note: Ron Howard is to direct and produce a movie version of the book.
Bookish Beck = Rebecca Foster. American transplant to England. Freelance proofreader and book reviewer.
Bookish Beck 