I must not be the only one who finds marriages endlessly fascinating – their birth, their duration, even their deaths. On the heels of Wednesday’s post about The Honeymoon’s Over comes this collection of short stories: You Won’t Remember This, by Katie Blackwell.
Politics and Prose (DC) included this book in a recent newsletter, with this description:
This debut collection of stories offers a dozen variations on the theme of marriage. Blackwell’s vivid characters are brides-to-be, new mothers, widows. They are contented spouses, cheating spouses, people with secrets, people haunted by lost loves. The portraits are witty and realistic, with endings neither tragic nor simply happy.
From Bookviews:
For those who love a good short story, a collection of those written in the best tradition of Southern fiction is You Won’t Remember This, by Kate Blackwell. At age 65, this is her first book, although she has been writing and publishing stories for years. These stories reveal an exceptional, well-crafted talent that invites us into places and the lives of characters the reader would not otherwise have access. These are edgy lives filled with conflict and tension, stories that span decades. This book is a real treat for anyone who loves good writing.
Here is a cool post by Katie Blackwell (a DC writer!) who was guest blogging at The Happy Booker (another DC book blogger!). She wrote about what it is like to read your stories in front of people in your life – friends and family, some of whom form the basis of characters in her stories:
I’ve been dithering all morning about what to read. There’s not a story in the book that isn’t at least partly drawn from memory, memory transformed, but these people won’t be fooled. In some cases, the memory was theirs in the first place. Shameful to say, my stories are usually about things that happened to other people, often someone in my family. I’m the onlooker, the thief of other people’s secrets. That’s been okay as long as I was publishing in lit mags where almost nobody I knew read them, certainly nobody kin to me. Now the book is out; they’ll know I’ve been spilling the beans.
Read the post to find out more about how she deals with this predicament – one I have always wondered about (and one that has perhaps even discouraged me from writing).