Christina Fitzpatrick’s first collection tells the stories of girls
and young women who cannot trust men. They have been hurt, abandoned and
threatened by brothers, fathers, and lovers. They are poor, and as children
they spend much of their time left to their own devices, while their mothers
go out to work.

These interconnected short stories are from both first and third person
perspectives, each focusing one one of five girls, at different times of
their lives. The stories don’t progress linearly, but move around in time.
The shifting in period and perspective lends the collection a fragmented
postmodern feel to the book. But Fitzpatrick defuses this at the end by
identifying herself as one of these five women, Claire, who majors in English
literature, and works as a bartender while trying to get started as a writer;
the book finishes with two stories, one of a train journey where three
of them meet on a train returning home, and finishing with a jokey fantasy,
“What If David Letterman’s Obsessed With Me?,” complete with references
to her writing classes and her life in New York City. Personally, I’d have
left that last one out of the collection, and replaced it with a story
of one of the other women, who, to be honest, were rather more interesting
than Claire. The self-revelation weakens the work, and makes it feel more
tentative and exploratory, haphazard rather than deliberate. It becomes
a bunch of attempts to convey a theme rather than a well-crafted exposition
of a multifaceted reality.

My favorite stories, predictably enough for someone like myself preoccupied
with with mental illness and the struggles of life, were “Missing” and
“Some More Craziness,” both about Mia. Mia’s father Francis jumped into
the river and drowned after he stopped taking his lithium, and these are
about how his death affects her life. The first, set a few months after
the suicide, is in the third person, when Mia is just ten. The second is
told by Mia herself, when she is sixteen. Francis’ body is never found,
although in “Missing” Mia’s mother Marilyn is phoned by the police and
asked to bring in a pair of his shoes, because they have found a bone from
a human foot in the river. Marilyn’s Aunt Abbie lives with them and talks
with Mia about what happened, even though her mother wants Mia protected
from the truth. In the next story, Mia and her friend are sunbathing when
their crazy neighbor Silver Scott comes by and complains that Mia’s parents
were using her pool the night before. Mia is furious about this lie and
the intrusion into her privacy, and her mother has the same reaction when
she Silver Scott comes round again that night. Both stories are poignant
and capture the strengths of the relationships between those left behind.

At its best, Fitzpatrick’s writing is sad and concise, even poetic.
The girls and women she describes have difficult lives, vulnerable to the
demands, violence and unreliability of men. The threads of their lives
weave together, making the reader care and feel how hard it is for them
to overcome what happened to them. Occasionally these women seem to be
just victims, but for the most part, there’s strength in their voices and
the recounting of their experiences.

© 2001 Christian Perring. First Serial Rights.

Christian Perring,
Ph.D., is Chair of the Philosophy Department at Dowling College,
Long Island. He is editor of Metapsychology Online Review.
His main research is on philosophical issues in psychiatry.
He is especially interested in exploring how philosophers can
play a greater role in public life. He is available to give talks
on many philosophical or controversial issues in mental health.

Categories: Fiction