Publisher: Knopf
Pages: 240
Rating: ★★★
Synopsis
Maya is in love with both her boyfriend and her boss. Sadie’s lover calls her as he drives to meet his wife at marriage counseling. Gwen pines for her roommate, a man who will hold her hand but then tells her that her palm is sweaty. And Sasha agrees to have a drink with her married lover’s wife and then immediately regrets it. These are the women of Single, Carefree, Mellow, and in these eleven sublime stories they are grappling with unwelcome houseguests, disastrous birthday parties, needy but loyal friends, and all manner of love, secrets, and betrayal.
In snappy, glittering prose that is both utterly hilarious and achingly poignant, Katherine Heiny chronicles the ways in which we are unfaithful to each other, both willfully and unwittingly. Maya, who appears in the title story and again in various states of love, forms the spine of this linked collection, and shows us through her moments of pleasure, loss, deceit, and kindness just how fickle the human heart can be.
My Thoughts
I have been really drawn to short stories and memoirs lately. They are so easy to read and they are easy to be able to put down and pick up when you're busy. I mostly chose this book because I thought it had a really pretty cover. Once I dove into it, I realized that the writing was equally as beautiful.
Heiny's writing is so beautiful that several times I had to stop and think about what she had just said and re-read it. Mostly, I enjoyed the way she described things that I myself had experienced but never knew how to describe.
The stories are mostly separate, except for three of the stories that follow the character Maya. All of the stories serve as an inside look into many different types of relationships; affairs, unhappy couples, solid marriages.
None of the stories were totally out of the box, but real life situations. The biggest draw at the end of the day though is Heiny's writing. She is wonderfully descriptive and really exposes all of the relationships in these stories.
For reference my favorite stories (in not order) were: The Dive Bar, Single, Carefree, Mellow, Dark Matter, Grendel's Mother.
My Favorite Line
...And she wishes, not for the first time, that life did not have to be a continuous series of eliminations, a constant narrowing of your options, a long series of choices in which you were always unhappy - that you couldn't choose two things at one time.
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