"Send nudes" by Saba Sams

An audio book (so my attention may have wavered). Stories from Granta, Stinging Fly, White Review, etc

• Tinderloin - a girl, 16, whose mother died when she was 6, helps her butcher father. She recalls him dealing with her first period. She meets Ryan, 27, and quickly loses her virginity. More blood. Her father helps her get an abortion a month later. She gets attached to Ryan's dog Petal, feeding it scraps from her work. Petal becomes possessive and bites Ryan badly - there's blood and he holds his arm "like a baby". They split, the girl taking Petal.
• Overnight - The female narrator (father gone) and George have been friends for years, since their early school years. She wakes one morning to find him in bed with her and her virginity gone.
• Snakebite - Meg (a studious student) is working behind a bar when Lara and a boy come in. Lara wants to be friends with Meg (they're on the same course, though Lara rarely goes to lectures) because she lacks female friends. Lara opens Meg's eyes to a new way of living. Meg's aware she's naive and that Lara's teaching her - when Lara gets drugs, the cost being a blowjob, she gets Meg to do the blowjob. When Meg suddenly has sex with a male co-barworker (she was nearly a virgin) Lara tells her she's already had him. Lara's expelled and Meg's warned about her marks. Meg invites Lara to move in, and she gets her a pet rabbit that moves freely around their room. Meg likes sharing her single bed with Lara. She begins to understand how marriages could work. 6 weeks later they visit Lara's suddenly dying mother, who complains about Lara's negligence. When they get home, Lara disappears. Meg find her very drunk and drags her home. Meg empties Lara's bank account and has sex with a passing postman in their bed. Meg's love is unconditional. Lara leaves then returns after a few days because her mother has died. She's bought some watercress for the rabbit she's been unkind to. They have sex for the first time. Meg comes, Lara doesn't, but she doesn't mind. Lara disappears in the night.
  I like the story, though the main plot's now too common - a quiet, submissive person has a whirlwind relationship that changes them forever, the wild person ending up being the vulnerable one.
• Send nudes - Waiting for a bus, the narrator exchanges sexy typed words with an anonymous guy in a chatroom. A storm is due. He asks for a nude photo. She writes "you first" so he does, while she's on the bus by a boy. The poster seems a nice guy, not too pushy. She doesn't usually feel good about her body shape. The dialogue has made her feel confident though, walking naked in her flat that evening. When she does finally post a headless nude photo she seems not to intend to continue the dialogue (because he might not like her if they meet?). The storm breaks, "The whole city flashes".
• Flying kite - Sage (female) is a pubescent foster child. Kite is a foster child with the same family, a 6 y.o. boy who, when asked to choose his name saw a kite flying free. Jara, the mother, had given up on getting pregnant but she's pregnant now. She thinks the children should be at the birth. Kite has been told he needs to return to his natural mother. He's re-assured that his father won't be there. Sage tells him of an idea to get him adopted. They see the water birth. It puts Sage off having a child. Kite drifts away. She finds him outside looking at the horizon.
• Here alone - Emily picks up Toby for casual sex then phones him a few times. He invites her to an engagement party where there are lots of his old friends and his recent ex. She tells Emily that Toby still loves her, and that he's only with Emily to make her jealous. Emily breaks up with Toby after phoning him, drunk, another 13 times. She goes to an Italian restaurant and sucks strands of spaghetti up one by one.
• The mothers and the girls - The girls (about 15 y.o.) have mothers who perform as trapeze artists at festivals. The 2 girls are used to going along too. They meet River, a boy who's a bit older. He doesn't exploit them though they are given laced cake. They gently compete for his affections. He doesn't want to choose. They try to force him. When he refuses they might try to kill themselves at the end, jumping off the trapezes.
  The characters are often referred to as "the girls" and "the mothers".
• Blue 4eva - Frank, a photographer, has married Clare. They each have a daughter - Jazmin 18, and Stella 12. They go on holiday with Blue, an old friend of Jazmin. Stella wants to be accepted by the older girls but she doesn't understand all that they say. At least one of them thinks that Clare is a marriage-breaker and Frank is a bit creepy. When Blue throws Frank's expensive camera into the pool, Stella tries to take the blame.
• The Bread - A woman who's had an abortion is also trying to bake her own sour dough bread (which is like becoming a mother, says the yeast-provider). We get flashbacks about how she got pregnant (last night of a festival) etc. When she returns from the clinic she's wearing a nappy which reminds her that "When my little brother stopped wearing nappies, my mother laid a sheet of plastic over his mattress that crackled in the night. She was attentive to him when we were young because of the baby she'd lost before he was born. She and my father had planted a rose bush for the baby in the back garden. I was 4. "That's my sister," I told my neighbour, shouting over the fence"
• Today's square - A little daughter has been promised a holiday in Tenerife by her poor mother. Lockdown arrives. The girl notices bags of sand left by builders and uses them to convert a room into a beach. The mother despairs, then recovers.

Quite a few absent parents and early parental deaths - an easy way to pump up the emotional power and justify behaviour. But she doesn't over-exploit the opportunities. She selects details carefully, not providing backstory (upbringing, etc) unless it's useful to do so. I like the way (in "Send nudes" for example) that she can carefully describe everyday events like having a shower and a snack without it sounding symbolic yet giving us an insight into the person. The scenarios are varied enough. My favourite was "Snakebite".

Other reviews

• Madeleine Feeny (In spare, rhythmic sentences, this exhilarating collection captures the light and dark of negotiating relationships, solitude, sexuality and loss. Sams makes language her own, conjuring piercing imagery that leaves its imprint on your mind)
• Valerie O’Riordan (It’s not all perfect, of course: Blue, in ‘Blue 4eva’, evokes more than a shade of the manic pixie dream girl, and there’s an emphasis on body size in ‘Flying Kite’ that sits uneasily (couldn’t Sage’s awkwardness in relation to her yoga-teacher foster mother be articulated another way?), while the protagonist of the title story comes to terms with her own fatness via the interest of an anonymous man online in a way that seems to run counter to the self-determination shown by her characters elsewhere. But these are, nonetheless, minor niggles. In other pieces, Sams neatly overturns the predictable tropes we might find reproduced by less skilled writers)