Review: This. This. This. Is. Love. Love. Love.
Jennifer Wortman
167 pages
Split/Lip Press (2019)
Read this if you like: Susan Minot, Kristen Roupenian, writing flash fiction
Tl;dr summary: Stories of people trying to find and show love and mostly failing, but in a funny, beautifully-written way.
I had the privilege of being introduced to this book by hearing the author read aloud—“The Men I Love” and the first few pages of “Love You. Bye.”, which was ultimately what convinced me I needed to buy the book. The setup of the collection’s opening story introduces a recently-depressed-but-doing-better narrator and her psychic friend who sees light cords connecting people to the things and people they love, told with the exact level of quirkiness I prefer in my literary fiction.
While these opening stories are what made me want to buy the book, though, now that I’ve read the whole collection, they’re well down my list of favorites. This collection has a driving momentum that pulls the reader from story to story like they’re Pringles, and I found myself reading more of the stories than I’d intended to each time I sat down with it.
The thematic linking of the stories is I think what impressed me most about this collection in a whole-book sense. The stories all feel like they belong together and inhabit the same general territory but without becoming repetitive or stale. Wortman was smart in how she interspersed short-shorts between longer stories, employing a variety of forms and POVs to keep the voice fresh with each piece. All of the protagonists exist somewhere on the “hot mess” spectrum, but each in their own unique way.
Which, ultimately, leads to what impressed me the most about this collection on an individual story level: Wortman’s ability to create three-dimensional, realistic characters in very minimal space. Many of the narrators featured in these stories are simultaneously sympathetic and unlikeable, and that contradiction adds the complexity that makes them feel like real people. The narrator in “I’m Dying without You, Tom” is maybe the best example of this. The narrator, Shelly, is an awkward college student struggling through her first year, and I related to her desperate, flailing efforts toward human connection even while I cringed at the self-defeating ways she went about it. Wortman builds this level of complexity even into the characters of the short-short works, like the two-page knockout “The Speech” that is, by a slim margin, my favorite work in the collection (and as close to a perfect piece of flash fiction as I think I’ve ever read).
If I have one critique, it’s that the stories where Wortman plays the most with traditional narrative are, to my tastes, the weakest works. I thought “How to Get Over Someone You Love in Ten Easy Steps” was amusing, but was the only piece in the collection that I don’t think is successful in crafting a narrative. Similarly, I very much wanted to love “Which Truth, Patricia?” and I find the idea of the overlapping narratives intriguing, but that was the only story where I found myself lapsing into workshopping brain rather than full reading immersion. On the other hand, it’s also the one that made me feel the most creatively inspired—I finished that story, not still thinking about the characters, but with new story ideas bouncing around my head, and any work that leaves readers with that kind of feeling is doing something right.
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