Stories from Granta, Esquire, Harper's, etc. Women have prettier friends.
- Ghost lover - The main character ("You", Ari) is recognised as she's buying a sandwich. After breaking up with Nick she had an idea for an app that's made her rich in 2 years. It lets experts transparently write online love letters for the user. She doesn't feel pretty among the beautiful people of her new clique. When she told Nick about an abusive ex, he was furious. When she tells Jeff, her new partner, about Nick once being non-consensual, he's merely upset. Her father died when she was 12. Karl, her mother's new partner abused her. He's been dead 18 months. She last saw Nick then. She'd wanted to get back together. She'd left him because she'd known he would leave her. Now she hopes that her wealth might tempt him back, but he's with a young ex-Harvard honey haired girl. She masturbates looking at online photos of her. She thinks about suicide. She gives a talk - "Because you have shown them how to win men, you may now show them how to win themselves"
The prose can be dense and sparkly -Nick hadn't noticed you, so you ran out, without your computer and your pile of books. You sweated around a corner until they left in her car, which was sporty and black. This made you feel sick. Something about him being in a girl's car. Listening to her young music. When you went back in, the Chinese woman was standing by your table, protecting your stuff with her shadow. She nodded at you. You wanted to cry. You knew you would not come back, would never see her again. These tiny endings are all over the place and
You always fell hard for boys. Each one was his own fairy tale. One therapist said you got this from observing your mother. Another said it was a by-product of your father's death - Forty-Two - Joan is 42. She likes men in the 27-34 range. She's had sex once in the last year. She's going to a wedding of Jack, 32 who she was in love with. He's marrying Molly, 26. Joan's researched Molly online. Joan starts to smoke. She hasn't smoked for 15 years. Then we get Molly's PoV. She keeps thinking of unprotected sex she had with a cowboy. Is she making a mistake? Then we get Jack's PoV. Again, some quotable phrases -
- "her subway-tiled bathroom looked like an advertisement for someone who flew to Europe a lot"
- "One thing good about being forty-two was that she had eaten enough golden osetra to be able to predict any party conversation"
- "She felt like she had eighteen clitorises, and all of them couldn't drive"
- Beautiful - Jane, a prop master, sees that the girlfriend of M.B., the main actor she's working with, has OD'd. She sees photos of her online, one by a painting called "Welcome", a painting she'd been given by an ex. She loves talking one-to-one with M.B. and wants to sleep with him. She tells him she has the painting in her flat hoping it might be of sentimental value. She invites him to her flat one evening. They sleep together. Heaven. He offers $30k for the painting. She expected $40 but she accepts. She's still about $15k in debt.
- Padua, 1966 - America. Beautiful Miranda (Italian) was 44 last time the narrator (Italian) saw her, and Sol was 75. She was married to (but never really in love with) Luke, with a child, Caroline. Miranda was sleeping with a black drug dealer. She became addicted, left home and Luke didn't let her back She visited Sol. She said he'd left her lover. She missed her daughter. He said he'd help. He told her that he did his medical training in Padua (cheaper than the States, but he had to learn Italian). He fell in love with a waitress - a single mother with a 2 year old child. His strict parents didn't want him to have a step-son so when he returned to the States with the waitress, they left the child behind. So the narrator is Sol's dead wife?
My least favourite story so far. - Grace Magorian - "Grace was fifty. All right, fifty-one". She grew up in Ireland. She was 14 when her father died. She and her mother went to the States. Her mother's new partner George had regular sex with Grace. She became pregnant. Now she's a comfortably off Estate Manager. Single - she hasn't had sex for 3 years. She tries an upmarket dating site, sees someone she likes. She contacts him. He doesn't really reply. She spends 4 hours online searching for him. She creates a new, younger persona on the dating site. The same man replies. There will be no love of her life.
I don't get "As the years blurred away the glinting trapezoids of memory" - Air Supply -The narrator remembers when she went on holiday to Puerto Rico with her prettier friend Sara. Sara was going out with James (but keeps saying she'll leave her), and her deacon father was having an affair. The narrator had a boyfriend too. In Puerto Rico the 2 girls caught the eye of many males. The narrator's nicest memory was when the 2 girls, drunk, met a minor band. Sara went to the hotel room of an old one. The narrator went bar-crawling with a young one then looked for Sara, taking her to their car. They get lost and end up watching an illegal cock fighting event. They end up safely at their hotel. They stay in touch for years, Sara the keen one. The narrator has a baby. 3 years later Sara has a baby who needs an op with a 50% survival rate. She invites the narrator to the waiting room. They attract the attention of 3 young doctors.
- Maid Marian - Noni (film documentary maker) had hung around waiting for Harry (film maker, womaniser) to part from his wife Helene. They'd met in Paris when she was 21. When he did divorce Helene, he married Marion (10 years Noni's junior) instead of her. When he died he left his cherished watch to Noni in his will. She looked upon it as a sign. He'd discussed it with Helene - "Let the poor creature think it, Marian. She needs it, don't you see? It is just one thing".
- American Girl - Margherita is a pretty waitress who's been sleeping with ambitious politician Philip Coover, a man lots of woman fancy. Cremona, a TV host, has long fancied Philip. She's plump, and on her shows/podcasts help women who feel suicidal or overweight. After her mother died and her father soon brought a woman home for the night, Cremona felt suicidal and willed the woman to get cancer. She did. Cremona and Philip start going out together. She knows she loves him more than he loves her, that she might be good for his campaigning. He puts his name to a fundraiser hosted by Marie, an actress ("She looked out at the water. Now they were both looking out at the water and talking to it, like one of the countless terrible films she'd been in"). Marie likes Philip. Margherita's at the party. Cremona and Philip announce their engagement. Margherita finds Marie dead in her own pool.
- A suburban weekend - “Fern and Liv were always trying to decide who was prettier … Liv had a better chance of being called beautiful, especially by Black guys and Danes”. They’re 27, lounging by a pool at a country club. The last of Fern’s parents died a few months before. She wants men to like her. The previous night she’d slept with a respectable young Argentinian after a kissing competition, thinking that Liv was sleeping with his friend. Fern’s therapist says she’s clinically depressed. “Liv was obsessed with Fern’s dead parents”, and Liv had helped her through her bad times while criticizing Fer’s loose morals. Fern’s going to sell off much of the house contents. She wears her mother’s best dress and drives to a bar, sees Chip, a father who offers her coke. She leaves with him, has sex. She has a bowl of candies at home that she takes one from for each sin. It was nearly empty. Fern thinks Liv has refilled it. Fern eats several.
Other reviews
- Stephanie Merritt (Ghost Lover ... is peopled by outwardly successful, empowered women who are emotionally or sexually in thrall to men, often men who are not remotely worth the time spent obsessing over them. Sometimes the women themselves know it ... but still they persist in their self-abasement. ... Not all the stories are directly about sex; some deal with female friendship, or mothers and daughters, but these too, at their centre, are concerned with the ways in which a need for male attention dictates women’s interactions with one another. Some readers will feel a shock of recognition – Taddeo has a knack for saying what women often feel they can’t say aloud – while others will find the variations on a theme repetitive, if not downright depressing. The book’s biggest weakness is Taddeo’s fondness for overblown similes that strive so hard for originality they become completely unmoored from meaning. ... There are so many of these that you start to wonder if her editor was on extended leave.)
- Elizabeth Barber (For Taddeo’s characters, a lack of beauty causes real suffering that cannot be imagined away by reminders that beauty standards are contingent patriarchal fictions ... Part of the magic of Taddeo’s stories is that they are not prescriptively moralizing. Taddeo recognizes that beauty is a relevant social fact, and anyone who tells you otherwise is lying. This is a comfort: neither her characters nor her readers are chided as shallow and silly for wanting to be so pretty)
- Ian Macallen (the Pushcart-winning “Forty-Two.” ... Love and romance are downplayed, while sex is paramount to all of these stories. Characters want it, have it, are jealous of it. However, sex also serves as a lens to interogate subjects like power dynamics, female friendship, and aging. Throughout the collection, physical attractiveness plays a substantial role in how characters interact. They wield beauty as a weapon, and can be threatened by it. )
- Lynn Steger Strong ( “Ghost Lover” is populated similarly by women who want most of all to be wanted, mostly by men, though what they want even more is for the women around them to be jealous of how much they’re wanted by men. ... These women sometimes have jobs and interests beyond men, but they are almost never relevant to the action of the stories in this book. ... Books and stories are often premised on the idea that we’re there to watch people in a process of transformation, but often people don’t change at all. ... It pricks and prods you with its unrelenting focus on the many ways inhabiting a certain type of female body can ruin a life. Yet, as the stagnation spreads, the edges dull. ... they are too much of one type to puncture quite as deeply as they might have if they’d been allowed to delve a little deeper into what it is to be alive.)
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