The #1 “thing I want to do this year” on the 2012 horizon was to read more and the first book on my to-read list Everyone But You by Sandra Novack, a collection of short stories by the author of the best-seller Precious. The book jacket might make it feel like a series of soft pillow-talks, but I was surprised to find in it raw, fierce, sexual, and contentious snapshots of lives.
The Good Reads synopsis summarizes things pretty well:
“In this new collection of stories, [Sandra Novack] further demonstrates her mastery of the form while exploring a universal theme: the desire for connection.
In “Cerulean Skies,” a wife must deal with her husband’s artistic calling while reexamining the loss of her own creative passion. A young woman is forced to confront the truth of her past, and its affect on her present love life, when she inherits her late dad’s possessions in “My Father’s Mahogany Leg.” In “Memphis” a man walks a delicate line between caring for his schizophrenic brother and keeping his new marriage afloat. “The Thin Border Between Here and Disaster” finds two married college professors faced with the fallout from their divorce, and a boy wrestles with his faith after the death of his mother in “Morty, El Morto.””
The opening story, “Fireflies,” drew me into the book immediately with its not-quite-manic Pixie Dream Girl who imposes a relationship on a stranger by forcing her way into his life, then continuing to show up at his apartment until she just moves in when the slacker relents. She steamrolls into his life, gets to know his mother, tries to force him to go back to school, and turns his (boring) world upside-down.
This is an amazingly powerful and well written collection of stories about failed and failing relationships and about the basic human yearning for meaning, connection, and love in a difficult world.
