Sometimes you wanna go...

Lucky Girls - Nell Freudenberger (Ecco, 2003)


I'm kinda meh about short stories. I want my fiction in big epic doses, where I can fall into a world and only climb back out when I really must (the occasional New Yorker short story aside). So I put off this highly touted collection for years, delaying the actual pleasure of reading it.

225 pages, 5 stories. So if you're doing the math, these are longer than your typical short fiction. Not quite novella length, but more capable of letting me take a dip into the world, if not quite swim in it. The stories are chiefly about women, but maybe more about displacement. In three, Americans find themselves living in India, but in a way such that they don't quite belong in either land. And they are all at the mercy of relationships - their own, but also ones where they sit on the periphery, and yet still find themselves buffeted by storms.

And yet, for all these thoughtful pensive impulsive characters, I paused at a different line, attributed by the mother of the last tale's narrator: "If you're always thinking about how things are going to be in your life, you can never be happy."She then points out how her mother falls short of this recommendation for living, but the woman has a point. What would these stories be if the characters thought just a little less?