"I want to know that I will be okay" by Deirdre Sullivan

An audio book. 14 stories from Banshee, The Dublin Review, etc.

• The Mother - Leesha met Jim after her friends had married. Children didn't come. "She felt a bit like a toaster on the blink. He put the bread in but no toast popped out". They decide to buy an animal that grows in her womb. It's become trendy. But what animal? A bear? He lets her choose - a dog. But he might later prefer the dog to her
• A scream away from someone - a young single mother is sent abroad to live in London with her gay uncle who's in a long-term relationship with a married man. It's World War 2. The uncle's job was to search bombed ruins for bodies, photos, etc. He found a body that had his face, but older. The narrator (the mother's daughter) is haunted by the idea of seeing her face reflected and of always staying close enough to others so she can always scream for help.
• All That You Possess - 3 year old Pebbles has a 400 year old imaginary squirrel friend. Her mother tried suicide at 19. She recalls being tied up in hospital. "In hospital you learn their lies and they let you out. It wasn't you, you were a different girl". The squirrel sees the white scar on her wrist. The husband thinks they should do something. The girl says that the squirrel eats the her toes. One night the mother hears her screaming and finds that her toes are bloody. Alternative personas.
• The Bockety Woman - Great-grandad lived in a farm. He got a disabled woman (legs don't work so she drags herself around) from the workhouse to help her beautiful wife with the housework and kids. When the wife dies, the woman walks, dances with the father
• Hen - a bride-to-be finds henna'd hair in the shower which she shares with her husband-to-be. She finds hairs also on her hen event. Whose are they? She's dyed hers blonde since she was 15. She imagines what his lover's like. Maybe she enjoys lie-ins. The narrator doesn't.
• Pearleen - she finds lumps in her breast. Her daughter was born early, dead. The lumps are pearls
• Black spot - The female driver passes a flowered blackspot to and from work and wonders if she should stop. She works at a nursery. There's a strange beeping sometimes in her car on the way to work. She's childless. She reads in the newspaper about how the children she looked after have progressed. A colleague much younger than her has been promoted. One day the beeps start as she nears home. she can't stop them.
• Little Lives - the narrator's mother trades in dolls - haunted/possessed dolls with concocted backstories. Numbered paragraphs. The most interesting of the stories so far
• Appointment - She's on the hygentist's chair. She's been left looking after her mother while her siblings live their lives. She's resentful. When her father died with a heart attack she was in London having an abortion. The ending's rather tame.
• Skein - She has a thing about body hair. She had set herself milestones for have a boyfriend, having first sex, getting married etc, and tries to keep to those milestones. She has a vaginal cyst after sex. When it bursts, she pulls out a long thread. I've used that final idea too - from a wrist
• The host - the female narrator when young stayed with Nora while parents went away trying to fix their relationship. She (dreams that she?) falls down a well (actually a fissure). She's found the following morning. It had happened to Nora long before. The experience takes something away. From Nora it took the ability to have children.
• Her face - Driving home, she thinks she sees her mother, who she last saw 13 months before. They fell out over social media etc. Her mother doesn't like her, so she worries about not liking her own kids. She worries that she has her mother's face. A rambling ending.
• I want to know that I'll be okay - The narrator worries that she's strange, lying to her diary about having friends. She has one or two. When she's invited to a party she sneaks out at 11.30pm with her brother, gets drunk, pukes, and loses her phone
• Missing in the Morning - students are staying in one of their parents' cottages, rehearsing a student drama. They get a minibus to the nearest pub. We learn that while in a caravan, one of them when 6 was left with her younger brother who walked away and drowned in the lake. She later tried to kill herself and goes missing again.

The narrators, especially when their thoughts drift, have similar preoccupations and voices. Or maybe that's an impression caused by it being an audio book. I don't mind the supernatural element that's introduced seamlessly. "Little Lives" is my favourite.

Other reviews

• Good reads
• Emer O'Hanlon (fuses fairy-tale logic to a real-world earthiness with breathtaking results. ... a masterclass in writing about trauma, women’s bodies and hauntings of all kinds.)
• therestingwillow (The fourteen short stories in I Want To Know That I Will Be Ok draw on universal themes, many pertaining directly to the female experience, and all explored from the female perspective: motherhood, pregnancy and baby loss, illness, relationships, love, insecurity and infidelity, anger, difficult family relationships and the ties of family duty, and the growing pains of adolescence.)