another kind of lie

I am very grateful for all your short story suggestions, but at the moment I am beyond broke and unable to buy any books (if any rich international businessmen are reading this, I am not too proud to accept charity) and so currently I am working my way through any short stories I come across.

I picked up ‘Sunstroke’, by Tessa Hadley one day in a charity shop in St Annes and never got round to reading it.  Hadley is the author of two novels, Accidents in the Home, and Everything Will Be All Right, both of which I will definitely be looking up as I really enjoyed this collection.

Refreshingly, in an era where characters seem to need to be ‘pitchable’, Hadley writes about ordinary people, in everyday situations, although there is always a good story bubbling under the surface.  This is an assured writer with an enviably light touch and there are some quietly brilliant lines amid her understated prose, so when a woman indulges in an adulterous kiss in ‘Sunstroke’ she thinks:

‘She has an instant’s intimation of how she could, in a different life from the one she has had so far, come to need this terribly and not be able to get it: this calm impersonal interest of his, turned on her.’

‘Sunstroke’ tells the story of two married women with children, one of whom, Rachel, is considering starting an affair with Kieran.  Hadley isn’t interested in the rights or wrongs of this, nor apparently are the characters.  When Rachel tells Janie, her only response is, ‘Don’t get hurt.’

‘I should be so lucky’, Rachel replies, ‘As if’.

In fact in the end it is Janie who kisses Kieran, on the way home from the pub – a trip which Rachel has cried off to stay home and look after her daughter who is suffering the sunstroke of the title.  Hadley makes it clear that Kieran has kissed Janie purely because she is there; and so Rachel has been unlucky, and she remains unhurt.  Do we feel sorry for Rachel?  It is a curious upheaval of traditional moral values and one which feels very honest.

In another story, ‘Mother’s Son’, Christine, who herself had an affair with her son’s father while he was still married, counsels him when he admits to cheating on his girlfriend:

‘These things happen’, she soothed. ‘We can’t pretend they don’t. Even if we were good, if we were perfectly and completely chaste, we can’t control what happens in our imagination. So being good might only be another kind of lie.’

Hadley certainly seems to employ this frankness as a writer, reading these stories feels like eavesdropping.

I’m really enjoying #100stories so far, I’m off to Bulgaria tomorrow and will be taking ‘Blind Willow Sleeping Woman’ by Murakami and stack of Southern novels as ‘research’ for mine…

you can do it!

Another reason to love Miranda July is Learning to Love You More, an online community project where people accept assignments and their attempts are posted up on the site.  Unfortunately it closed for business in 2009, but you can still access the archives and try out some of the assignments yourself.

Some of my faves are:

Give advice to yourself in the past.

Describe what you want to do with your body when you die.

Make a portrait of your friend’s desires.

Repair something.

Make an encouraging banner.

Here’s mine -

I copied the words from one of my favourites on the site (my least favourites are “Be the best!” -too American cheerleadery, and “this too shall pass” – because I think it stops you from enjoying the good moments).  I like this one because it seems to mean lots of different things.  If you’re in need of some encouragement you should check out all the uploads as some will genuinely bring a smile to your face.  This is one of the more arty ones,

But my favourite is this one

I think the typo makes it perfect

I spoke to an old friend again recently who I haven’t seen for years and she said how much I’d changed, ‘You were such a tom-boy when we were kids, always climbing trees and getting your clothes ripped crawling through brambles.  I remember I was usually really scared but I would pretend not to be because I wanted to be cool like you.’  I have no recollection of being this person, it was nice to know I was once a fearless explorer.  So the next assignment I try will be:

Climb to the top of a tree and take a picture of the view.

And my idea for an assignment would be:

Ask your oldest friend what you were like as a child.

An overdue update on #100stories I am currently reading Tessa Hadley’s short story collection, Sunstroke which I’m really enjoying.  I’ll write a proper post on it once I’ve finished, just letting you know I haven’t fallen off the wagon! But if you don’t hear from me again, I may have fallen out of a tree….

no one belongs here more than you

So far so good with my short story project, thank you for all your recommendations! I started reading Miranda July’s ‘No one belongs here more than you’ collection before I began the project but sort of lost faith a little somewhere in the middle.  Each story features a protagonist who could kindly be described as eccentric right through to the downright crazy – all of them are believable on their own terms, but one after the other it’s a bit much… Sort of like if the entire cast of Friends were all Phoebe.  So it was the perfect book to dip into every day without attempting to read it straight through.  Perhaps this was the reason, but I found myself loving the last couple of stories.

I think my favourite is ‘Something that needs nothing’, in which two girls move out on their own and one is in love with the other.  I’m a bit fascinated by people moving out and putting their own stamp on a place, the psychology of it interests me I suppose.  I love Three Colours Blue where after a family tragedy Julie moves into an apartment in Paris without telling anyone, taking only the blue bead mobile from her old life.

Miranda July does a great job of evoking the feeling of leaving home and wanting to start living your exciting new life.  The story starts brilliantly:

In an ideal word, we would have been orphans.  We felt like orphans and we felt deserving of the pity that orphans get, but embarrassingly enough, we had parents.  I even had two.

I loved her description of the girls’ sheer joy at owning their own space:

We were anxious to begin our life as people who had no people. And it was easy to find an apartment because we had no standards; we were just amazed that it was our door, our rotting carpet, our cockroach infestation.

But most of all I loved this passage:

I could do it without you.

This made her so angry that she did the dishes. We never did this unless we were trying to be grand and self-destructive.  I stood in the doorway and tried to maintain my end of our silence while watching her scratch at calcified noodles.  In truth, I had not yet learned how to hate anyone but my parents.  I was actually just standing there in love.  I was not even really standing; if she had walked away suddenly, I would have fallen.

It’s so well observed and truthful that the book is worth reading for this story alone, but the others are great too.

The other story I read was by Jeffrey Eugenides (author of The Virgin Suicides) in the New Yorker, ‘Extreme Solitude’ which is about unrequited love too, between two literature students.  It started positively, with some brilliantly observed descriptions of the type of people you find taking literary theory classes (I make no apologies):

Zipperstein asked the students to introduce themselves and explain why they were taking the seminar.

The boy without eyebrows spoke up first. “Um, let’s see. I’m finding it hard to introduce myself, actually, because the whole idea of social introductions is so encoded. Like, if I tell you that my name is Thurston and that I grew up in Greenwich, Connecticut, will you know who I am? O.K. My name’s Thurston and I’m from Greenwich, Connecticut. I’m taking this course because I read ‘Of Grammatology’ last summer and it blew my mind.”

But then I felt the story began to collapse under its own weight.  It felt over-long and the references to literary theory came thick and fast until it felt like Thurston from Greenwich, Connecticut might in fact be writing this story, with a self-satisfied ironic look upon his face (although as he’s shaved off his eyebrows it would be hard to tell).  Perhaps I was overly influenced by my inability to believe a love story between two characters named ‘Madeleine’ and ‘Leonard’… Anyway the story is freely available online, so have a read and let me know what you think: http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/features/2010/06/07/100607fi_fiction_eugenides?currentPage=2#ixzz0puMGUnLP

The project continues!

100 days of short stories

I’m now officially writing my ‘dissertation’ for the Creative Writing MA, which is 15000 words of my novel, due in September.  Obviously I’ve already begun to find ways to procrastinate, and I’ve just signed up to the excellent 100 Days to Make Me a Better Person project.

The idea is you do one thing, every day, for 100 days.  I’ve decided to read a short story every day which will hopefully make me a better person in terms of being well-read, if not morally improved.  My lovely classmate Holly has signed up to find the good in every day and Jenn has been taking pictures of things that make her happy.  I was very aware when deciding on my pledge that I always go ridiculously overboard with these things and then fail early on and end up doing nothing.  It’s one of my few character flaws… So I’ve really tried to choose something manageable which I feel I can fit in without it becoming a chore.

During the MA we’ve been lucky enough to have lots of talks from people in the publishing industry and they’ve all repeated the message that short stories don’t sell and rarely get published.  One lady recently told us that if they do publish a short story collection it’s usually just to placate a best-selling writer and they generally make a loss on it.  I’m really not sure why this is.  I’m not predominately a short story writer myself but a lot of my classmates are and I feel discouraged on their behalf.  I would have thought short stories were the perfect format for our busy modern world – you can read a couple on the tube on the way to work, or one while the dinner’s on, or a few while the baby’s asleep.  Of course you could read a couple of chapters of a novel, but you don’t get the satisfaction of actually finishing something.  I wonder if this is actually the reason short stories are less commercial?  Perhaps people read for escapism, and you can never really escape into a short story; you only get a glimpse into another world, not the world itself.  I’m guilty of mostly reading novels myself, but hopefully in the next 100 days I’ll learn a lot about different writing styles and the short story as a form.

So wish me luck, I will keep track of what I read and recommend any writers I especially enjoyed.  I’m starting with Miranda July’s ‘No one belongs here more than you’.  I’m enjoying it so far, and her website for the book is adorable, check it out:

And here is an editorial on the five best short story collections from the Daily Beast which could prove useful if anyone else wants to join me.  If anyone has any other recommendations of short story collections or writers, let me know!