In high school, I wrote a short story that I thought was groundbreaking for using the word "crotch" to which my teacher was like... uh you can just say "lap" instead. It was about a man and woman who were seated next to each other on a plane, and she dropped airplane coffee on his crot—lap. It lacked a plot. It wasn’t a love story, but it wasn’t anything else instead, it was a bizarre description of two made-up people; American Airlines spon con. But I had something there. Whenever people meet on public transportation it is literature. One time coming home from college I was seated next to a Senior when I was a freshman and he noticed I was reading Dante’s Inferno. Mildly charming (on my part) conversation ensued but nothing became of it – it was neither literature, nor romance, but just kind of a run-on sentence in a free email newsletter.
It's a shame that my fiction career began and ended with the crotch story. Now all my invented scenarios just make me anxious, instead of making me millions of dollars because I wrote the kind of book they sell in airports and cast Daisy Edgar-Jones in. If I were to write fiction, it would not be short stories. Reading short stories feels like tasting the first bite of a really good tiramisu before it falls on the floor. And everything is so deliberate in a way that is not realistic, like, is the narrator eating microgreens because the character’s growth, like the greens, is finite, or is she just eating microgreens because they’re about to spoil? Unclear on what authority I criticize fiction writers when all I do is watch Love Island and go to the grocery store (I love it there).
In her nytimes book review, Lizzy Harding describes Maggie Shipstead, the author, as “An intrepid chronicler of sundry experiences” which is epic – write that on my gravestone next to “Amy B Dead :(.” A lot of short story collections are shades of the same and the tiny episodes blur together like a marathon binge-watch. Shipstead takes us on a world tour that is somehow distinctly not American Airlines spon con. It’s because her characters feel real, if I subscribed to the notion of “reality,” since ultimately we are all just brains in a vat plugging into the human experience. Not that it matters. More stimuli, please.
Has Shipstead turned me on the short story? Has Tom Holland turned me on the short king? Has Love Island rotted my brain such that I can only pay attention for 15 pages maximum? Yes, no, maybe.