Stories from The Reader, Areté, Zoetrope: All-story, etc. An interest in raised scars, peeled scabs, giving up smoking, and what swimming pools do to hair and skin.
- Legendary - She's with a man who keeps photos of his exs, and tells her about them - fragmentary details and habits. One of them, Holly, had a bad accident on a trapeze. The narrator's parents told her 2 years ago that she'd had an older sister who died when 10 months old. They can't describe her well. The persona begins to stalk Holly, watches her do a 1-person street performance as an automaton. When the persona break up with the man, she looks at the photo of her as if she was just another of his exs. She realises how few possessions she has.
- Date Night - Lily, 9, lives with her mother and Davy, a live-in maid in a 4th floor apartment. She can only see out by standing on things. A man comes to collect her mother. Lily talks to Davy about her life - the children she's had to leave behind. Her mother's back by morning.
- 101 - After a wedding the brother of the groom and sister of the bride drive the cars back with the wedding presents in. It's a long trip. They sleep together. After they arrive they go their own ways. She finds she's pregnant just as she finds her sister is. Then the parallism breaks - she terminates the pregnancy and doesn't go to the new baby's shower, baptism, etc.
- Julia K. - "When I grow up," she said, "I want to be a disease." Language, as she deployed it, was neither a line cast nor a bullet fired. It was a catholic mechanism: the sharp twist of a pilot biscuit into the waifish body of a christ ... "I want to be filthy with beauty," she said. He meets Julia K. in the playground to smoke. Maybe they have sex there. She lives above him. She meets her again in spring. She invites him to supper. Her mother wears a black chador and uses a walking frame. She's taken a vow of silence. While she watches a gory true crime TV show, Julia offers him inedible food. She says she's a tattoo remover. There's a big black fish in their bath. He glances into her room - no bed, but a ballet barre under the window. They go to the playground to smoke. She says she used to be a pole-dancer, stage name Proust. She was offered a lot of money by a customer. The contract involved a gagging order lasting 7 years. That evening, the 7 years were over. She says she was collected, drugged (hallucinogenic?), crucified (nails through palms, she still had the scars) then released. They have sex - "Her body a city: I carved a key out of soap, found the trapdoors and learned the secret knocks". After a few weeks he realises that she's moved out. The ending is Last week, I was in another city. Julia was there, in a black bar on a black street, holding a dark drink. "You again," she said and took a sip. I offered her a cigarette, She said she'd quit
- DD-MM-YY - When Adam (first-person) returns to the family house after the end of his Art college year, Coney (ex neighbour) is asleep (getting over drugs) and Marc (brother, med student) is out at a party. Adam and Marc are triplets, the other one dying at birth. Coney, Marc's girlfriend and band-partner (DD-MM-YY was the band's name), used to be clever. Adam used to secretly sleep with her too ("I used to wonder what was in it for Coney. Why bother cheating on Marc with someone who looked exactly like him? It just seemed like double the work. Now, I think was was trying to make one person out of the two: the one she loved and the one who loved her). She caused a car accident. When she told Marc she was sleeping with Adam he broke Marc's nose. It's still crooked. She had amnesia, forgetting that she's slept with Marc. She has sex with her. Then she asks him how they were together. He asks if she's back with Marc. She says no but he doesn't believe her. It's true.
- Laurens - The sister and brother's mother killed herself. They're maybe in their early teens. They're both refered to as "Lauren". The girl has a sleep-over with friend Kumi. When she returns, she checks to see if her father's brought a woman home. He hasn't. She takes one of her dad's guns and shoots him. The boy has a sleep-over with Jericho. His father collects him almost a day late. When they stop to shop, the girl behind the counter doesn't let him buy alcohol. They have an accident. The father might be dead. The mother's ghost tells the boy that the father needs a hospital so the boy drives the broken car.
- Candy Glass - Written like a script. Filming in Miami. DC is a women who drives wearing black - balaclava too - so that people think the car is driverless. She's a stunt double for the first-person narrator who has come out. Seems that DC was somehow a boy at 15. They make love. DC has an accident, becomes blind in one eye, ending her career. She decides to move somewhere new, find a man, go to church. The narrator imagines DC years later watching one of her own films with her husband, watching the credits to the end.
- Ghosts - She and AJ live together. They meet in a hotel. Dr Barry is a therapist. I don't get it.
- New Jersey - Jimmy (female) and Erin are 17. Erin has a boyfriend and will go to college. Jimmy's going into the Army and might be gay. They drink vodka and go to heavy metal gigs. While in bed together after a gig, Erin says that 2 days before, she'd lost her virginity with her boyfriend. She provides details. Jimmy is hurt that Erin hadn't told her before. Jimmy dreams of dissecting a squirrel in a desert. She wakes and walks towards the pier.
- Transformer - The first-person female narrator has a male friend who lives on a boat - "People say the first one is the one you'll love forever, so I pop my cherry with a Coke before inviting myself over". His studio used to be swimming baths. Later he's married.
- Would Like to Meet - The female first narrator is robbed while closing her gift shop. That evening "I thought if my life was a movie, this was when I'd decide to be artificially inseminated, open a cake-making business, or cycle across South America". In Time Out she sees that a couple is asking for a girl. They take her out for a meal. It won't be a threesome - first the man would go out with her, then the woman. The woman says she has terminal bone cancer and wants to know her husband will be ok without her. Later the wife phones to say they've changed their minds about the idea.
From to "Julia K." to "Candy Glass" I was impressed. The other pieces weren't quite so much fun.
Other reviews
- goodreads
- James Smart
- Kirkus reviews
- Tobias Carroll (That sense of overlapping and blurred identities is one of the ways in which “Things to Make and Break” stands out. There’s also a deeply physical, tactile element to many of these stories)
- Eleanor Hemsley (the stories are all really sad)
- Christopher Allen
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