Sad Grownups (Stilhouse Press) is Amy Stuber’s debut short story collection, but it does not read as a first book. There are no shaky formal experiments, no amateurish ragged edges, no not-quite-there sketches to round out the page count. Each story is grounded and the writing is assured. Revelatory, bullseye details bring her characters into relief in a matter of a sentence. There are recurrent themes – adolescence, atonement, motherhood – but no sense of redundancy. The book is situated squarely in contemporary American life, though her characters often make unexpected decisions and utterances. It’s actually no surprise that this collection has sprung out fully formed, like a wise and battle-ready Athena; Amy has an extensive publishing history with literary journals beloved by other writers and experience writing across several genres.
I met Amy when I was part of the flash fiction team at Split Lip Magazine for a few years (and where she remains as flash fiction editor). I was curious about what this collection would look like after we’d had so many conversations about what makes a piece of short fiction tick (or fail to deliver) and was thrilled by the chance to ask a few questions about her process.
Megin Jimenez
I want to start with a love letter to the short story. I know you’ve written in various genres and forms, including poems and novels. I’d love to hear your thoughts on what keeps you coming back to the form. What do short stories offer to you as a writer? I’m also curious about your models or inspiration. Was there a particular story or writer that served as a touchstone for this collection?
Amy Stuber
I usually approach writing with a feeling, a sort of buzzing in my brain, amorphous but pulsing, that often translates elliptically in a short story form. A novel takes a lot of conceptualization and planning, and I’m really less good at that and the sustained thought over months and years that a novel requires (though I have tried that and am currently trying it again).
I really love that a short story can, in a very consolidated way, hold a whole life and the wants and sadnesses that go along with that. I also think a story can hit on big emotional moments even page after page and have really concentrated style in ways that a novel can’t; there’s more breathing room required in a novel, more downtime, pacing, and plot.
I don’t think any one writer or story served as a touchstone for these stories, but I am sure I was influenced by short story writers I read while writing these stories, everyone from people I loved when I was first learning to write short fiction, like Joy Williams, Amy Hempel, Lorrie Moore, Denis Johnson, Jhumpa Lahiri, and then authors I read for the first time in the 2010s and early 2020s, like Danielle Evans, Jamel Brinkley, Anthony Vessna So, Akhil Sharma, Dantiel Moniz, Morgan Talty, Edward P. Jones, Bryan Washington, I could go on but will stop!
Megin Jimenez
I know that as an editor of a literary journal, you’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what can and can’t be pulled off in a short story. The story “Dead Animals” in particular made me think about the point of view of an editor, the most demanding sort of reader. It starts, “Take me on a journey. Make me feel something,” and this pushy voice keeps interrupting the narrator, steering the course of the narrative. This kind of external or metatextual element frames several of the stories. “Day Hike,” the opening story, for example, is a story within a story. A few pages in, we find out that the narrative of a lesbian couple on vacation was written by a young writer, and it’s being critiqued by her undermining friend. These are risky moves – the meta element can sometimes create too much distance or seem merely like smug postmodern antics. But I found that in your work this dual perspective actually gives the stories more depth and complexity. I wonder if you usually started with this idea of an external or meta voice in these stories, or if it’s a layer that came later in the process?
Amy Stuber
Prior to this collection, I was extremely distrustful of meta elements and worried that any time I added something that might be too flashy or intrusive or trying too hard into a story it would read as gimmicky and would somehow take away from the actual emotion of the story. As an editor at Split Lip, I have seen a lot of stories where a plot twist or trick or some kind of meta device is privileged at the expense of all other aspects of the story, so I was really worried I’d fall into that trap. Like “big idea” primacy.
At the same time, having been writing stories since the 1990s, I was bored with my little traditional narratives and found myself wanting my drafts to be more and do more. So I started adding things in – playing with point of view or perspective or form in ways I hadn’t before.
These layers almost always came as a second stage during the writing process. I wrote “Dead Animals” as a pretty standard narrative, thought it was lacking, and felt the need for a larger, more guiding voice to enter the story. In a way, it’s a conscience, and a lot of these added elements serve to break the intensity or even potential monotony or uniformity of vision of one character or situation and offer another angle or another in-road to the ideas.
Megin Jimenez
The past 20 years or so have been an exciting time in terms of seeing women’s experiences reflected more expansively and in new ways in fiction. And these vast, unexplored territories still remain wide open to women writers, after so many centuries of silence: girlhood, sex and sexuality, friendship, aging, beauty, ambition… Your book is a notable contribution. Motherhood in particular is a major throughline. There are women contemplating motherhood, mothers who have left their children, mothers who have died, mothers who are ambivalent about being mothers, mothers who cannot or will not protect their children from harm, and even a mother who has committed the worst harm. The word “mother” itself is not neutral, it’s fraught with meaning; how we understand “mother” as a verb for example.
While I like to think of myself as an open-minded reader, a couple of the stories made me check my own biases. In the story “Corvids and Their Allies,” the initial point of view is of a child whose mother takes him away from his father in New York to live in what reads as a cult in California. Towards the end of the story, the perspective shifts to the mother, and I was surprised at the gentle way you handled this moment. I had assumed our attitude as readers was judgment of her choices, but the view inside her mind had a softening effect. There’s a sense of empathy in the depiction of all of your characters; there are no villains. Was motherhood a conscious theme for you? I’m wondering if you started writing with particular questions about mothers, and if you found any answers, or maybe you unearthed new questions?
Amy Stuber
In the 2010s, there was a big wave of “moms gone wild” or “bad mom” books where women were guzzling wine and fucking around and dismissing the 2000s trappings of the hyper-focused, selfless mother in dramatic ways. Many of these books are really well done, but I also couldn’t relate beyond superficially because many of the main characters felt to me like a real either/or dichotomy, like these smiling people had gone happily toward domesticity, done it well and without complaint for a while, and then something clicked off for them, and they exploded themselves temporarily out of it. I never felt inclined toward motherhood prior to my mid-30s, so I guess I wanted to write about the wary domestics, the gray-area, initially ambivalent mothers who might have fraught relationships with their own mothers, people weighted by trauma, fucked-up people who maybe happen into parenthood and then keep fucking up, even if they also want to be good and want the best for their children but because of their own personal flaws or psychological issues make mistakes, small and large.
I think it’s easy to depict women as either/or: maternal or not, good at motherhood or hating it, perhaps because we as women are often presented with an un-nuanced binary of what women can be: bitter, angry woman storming away from parenting or absolute smiling trad wife. And what interested me, as I was coming out of my own long period of postpartum depression and all the self-destructive life complications I created within that period, was thinking about creating women characters who were not just one way or the other: who wanted badly to be good at parenting, who felt invested and who cared, but who also couldn’t do it well or couldn’t do it at all.
This collection does have a lot of parents who make extreme mistakes and who maybe inadvertently pass their insecurities and trauma down to their children. I think that’s just a hard realization you have when someone starts depending fully on you: you’re going to often do it wrong, and they will be imprinted by some of your best and worst choices.
Writing all these stories about these flawed but striving women has reminded me that America tends to hate actual women while being obsessed with theoretical, idealized women.
Megin Jimenez
I think the story “People’s Parties” is my favorite in the collection, though I’m still thinking through why that is. I know it has to do with the astounding ending (which I won’t spoil here), how quickly and solidly three characters are established, and the quality of the writing, which again had a kind of inherent grace to it, both the language used in the descriptions of the various settings (glitzy San Francisco apartment, houseboat and beach), and the care taken with each character’s point of view.
“People’s Parties” is also a good example of your deft maneuvering of tension. So many short stories fall into a pattern with tension and conflict, establishing a long set-up, where the reader is bracing for “the bad thing” to happen, and then the ending serving as a make-or-break element that justifies, comments on, or punctuates the conflict (or leaves us unsatisfied). Your stories often subvert this pattern, where the central conflict has already taken place, or it’s not given primacy; the narrator eludes this plot imperative. Could you talk a bit about how you approach conflict or tension in how you build your stories?
Amy Stuber
I guess I often think of an intractable situation as a conflict, something static and frozen, and then work toward giving the character a way out, sometimes a temporary exit that we may know as readers is only temporary, even if it’s clear the character doesn’t realize that. Many of the stories in this collection follow this pattern, so a situation takes the place of traditional plot sometimes, and escaping the situation is, instead of “the bad thing,” the good thing.
In 2020, I tried to turn “People’s Parties” into a novel, and now I have 310 pages about Bea, and Ray, and Wendy, and I don’t know if anything will ever happen with them. That attempt brought me to the realization that I am more interested in character and emotion than plot, even though things definitely happen in these Sad Grownups stories (a robbery, murders, attempted murder, assault, lots of crime now that I think about it!)
But this goes back to your first question. It’s probably why I’m more comfortable writing a short story than a novel. I think stories can give us these intense, fulfilling, emotional windows that don’t have to necessarily go from A to B to C or follow some propulsive chain of events. Sometimes when I’m reading a contemporary novel, I find myself skimming because the plot has taken over, and I just want to know what has happened. I hate when I do that because, really, as a reader, I want the sentences to be so beautiful and laden that I have no urge to skip even a word.
FICTION
Sad Grownups
by Amy Stuber
Stillhouse Press
Published October 8, 2024
