Lauren Bufferd

This summer brings two short story collections perfect for dipping in and out of on your vacation: one by naturalist and poet Lucia Perillo, and a debut offering by Natalie Serber. Both focus on families, though the majority of Serber’s work is devoted more specifically to the ties between mothers and daughters.

The 14 stories in Happiness Is a Chemical in the Brain are firmly rooted in the small towns and quiet neighborhoods of the Pacific Northwest. Three linked stories follow Louise, a developmentally disabled adult who is a good-natured witness to her mother’s unhappiness and her younger sister’s sexual adventures. Many of Lucia Perillo’s adult characters recollect their childhoods, seeking answers to current situations in past behaviors. The wild exploits of youth are dissected in several stories such as “The Cavalcade of the Old West,” in which two sisters recall their adventures at a summer fair before one sister’s promiscuity drove them down separate paths. In “Report from the Trenches,” a frustrated housewife lives vicariously through the memories of her neighbor, now prim and proper, but once a female gang member. The narrator in “A Ghost Story,” one of the strongest stories in the collection, remembers her years as a “girl flagger” in a highway crew and the affair she had with a man who literally picked her up off the street.

Perillo’s characters are tough but with an edgy wit and a refreshing lack of self-pity, despite their often dead-end circumstances. Perillo’s work as a poet informs and deepens her language; in “Big-dot Day,” a miserable young boy, dragged cross-country by his mother and her new boyfriend, catches a gull with the boyfriend’s fishing rod while stuck in a motel room. The title story of a chronically ill woman suspecting her husband of infidelity ends with a striking vision of a quilt turning into migrating birds.

Natalie Serber explores the emotional rollercoaster of motherhood, from euphoria to fear and everything in between. Most of the stories in Shout Her Lovely Name trace the life of Ruby Hargrove, the daughter of an alcoholic father and depressed mother and herself the single mother of a daughter, Nora. Beginning with “Ruby Jewel,” the stories follow Ruby as she disentangles herself from her parent’s emotional neediness, only to be abandoned with a new baby, and throw a spotlight on seminal episodes of Ruby and Nora’s peripatetic life from New York and California. Each of the other three stories in the collection stands alone, but their subjects—a mother addressing her teenage daughter’s anorexia, a new mother comforting an orphaned baby on a plane and a middle-aged wife and mother taking stock of her life at her husband’s 50th birthday party—mirror and echo the themes explored so thoughtfully in the stories of Nora and Ruby. Like Perillo, Serber writes with grace, humor and a thoughtful, but realistic, understanding of the emotional toll demanded by families.

Two events with a lasting effect on American culture are celebrating a centenary in 2016: the founding of Planned Parenthood and Georgia O’Keeffe’s fateful meeting with Alfred Stieglitz. The women at the center of these events are at the heart of two new works of historical fiction.

With the mission of Planned Parenthood being questioned almost as much today as it was at its inception, the timing is eerily apt for Terrible Virtue, Ellen Feldman’s powerful novel about the organization’s founder, Margaret Sanger. Sanger, whose personal life was as tumultuous as her political and social convictions, remains a controversial figure, held to current standards of ethical correctness just as she was held to impossible models of femininity during her lifetime. 

Watching her own mother succumb to an early death after bearing 13 children led Sanger to advocate for family planning, despite a limited formal education. Her desire to make a difference in the lives of poor and working-class women led her to Europe, where ideas about contraception were more progressive. After her return to the United States, she opened a clinic in Brooklyn—and was jailed for it.  

Feldman lets Sanger tell her own story, but separates the chapters with sections narrated by Sanger’s two husbands, her sister and her children. The voices of those who suffered under the singularity of Sanger’s purpose offer depth to Feldman’s vision of this complex figure—a reminder of what was gained, but also what was sacrificed.

A different kind of sacrifice was made by Georgia O’Keeffe in Dawn Tripp’s gorgeous novel, Georgia, which focuses on the years O’Keeffe spent with photographer Alfred Stieglitz. 

The love story of O’Keeffe and Stieglitz is well known. Their passionate affair and his incredible photographs of her, both clothed and nude, caused a sensation at the time and are still considered seminal in the history of photography. But Tripp suggests that O’Keeffe paid a price for that notoriety. The battle that rose between her and Stieglitz was ultimately about her work as an artist, especially her early abstractions, which she believed were overshadowed by the obvious eroticism of his photographs. O’Keeffe’s iron grip on her legacy and her need to reinvent herself in the Southwest is a key part of this exquisitely told story. 

Like Terrible Virtue, Georgia relies on a first-person narrative, but in this novel, there is no other voice but O’Keeffe’s. Though the novel opens and closes in 1979 in New Mexico, it quickly plunges into the years just before World War I. The arrival of the young art teacher at Stieglitz’s gallery in New York, the expansive family home on the shores of Lake George and O’Keeffe’s first glimpses of what would become the major inspiration for the second half of her life, are all beautifully told. 

Terrible Virtue and Georgia remind us that the ongoing culture wars are nothing new, but that life can be changed for the better with bravery, dedication and vision.

This article was originally published in the March 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Sing to It is the much-anticipated new collection from Amy Hempel, her first since 2006, and Lot by Bryan Washington is a stellar debut set among the diverse neighborhoods of Houston. Both collections share a generosity of spirit rooted in our common humanity and the social desire to connect.

Hempel is known for her brevity, and of the 15 stories here, 10 are less than three pages long. In some cases, an idea is succinctly stated and explored in less than three paragraphs. But there’s nothing minimal about the contents. Hempel packs a great deal into the briefest of fictions, creating balanced and nuanced stories of longing, love and loss.

Despite her creative thrift, it’s in the longer stories that Hempel’s empathy and ready wit shine. In “A Full-Service Shelter,” inspired by the author’s real-life dedication to animal advocacy, she repeats the opening phrase of each paragraph to drive home both the passion and futility in caring for abandoned, abused dogs. Most affecting is the novella “Cloudland,” about an unnamed middle-aged woman who is haunted by memories of a daughter given up for adoption. These recollections are made more painful when she hears a horrible rumor about the long-shuttered agency. The narrative shifts subtly in time, circling back and jumping ahead, revealing the character’s tenacity as well as her despair.

Washington’s brilliant and visceral Lot lives up to the considerable amount of buzz it has already received. Each story is named for a different Houston neighborhood, and roughly half concern a young man whose life is complicated by an adulterous father, a drug–hustling brother and a growing attraction to men. Though this main character is refreshingly straightforward about his sexuality, his relatives respond with shame, embarrassment and, in the case of his brother, violence.

The remainder of the stories emanate from locations across the sprawling Texan city. In “Alief,” through a first-person plural voice, neighborhood residents consider their role as they collectively witness a love affair that’s turned violent. “Peggy Park” recalls the pleasures of a pickup baseball team. In the book’s centerpiece story, “Waugh,” the two main characters are a young hustler and his pimp, and the focus is less on the hazards of their profession than on the bonds of trust and friendship that exist between them. Washington’s strong ear for dialogue and his lack of sentimentality serve these stories well.

Though their styles are different, Washington and Hempel capture both the harshness and the tenderness of the world. The stories are romantic but not corny and fiercely moral without being judgmental, capturing the complexities that make up a community.