In the first sentence of the first story of Patient, Female, a young schoolgirl gets pushed off a jungle gym by Finny, one of her classmates. The push was an accident, the perpetrator claims. But can we be sure? The rest of the story follows Mariel, Finny’s mom, in the aftermath of the push. They coordinate with the school, attempt to visit Nan in the hospital, and take an ill-timed family vacation. Mariel was climbing around her own life’s jungle gym before all of this fell on her plate, and now she, too, has been pushed off.
Julie Schumacher’s perceptive new collection of short stories follows women in different stations all trying their best to manage their lives, all struggling with the impact of a disorientating push. A mother’s death forces a woman to deal with her estate and her hapless brother. A girl is unmoored by her family’s move and finds solace in a senior center Bridge club. A woman is gifted a spa week by her dead neighbor and during the week discovers a painful secret about her husband.
Working from the same themes, we see singular moments from these peculiar lives reflecting their shared core experiences. The women of Patient, Female are shouldering the burden not only of their own lives, but that of their family, friends, colleagues, and neighbors.The stories build upon each other with purpose; there are no recurring characters or setting, but the stories are linked by their themes of adversary and resilience, and the lack of superficial commonality lets each story add its own unique layer of perspective.
Schumacher’s prose is lucid and sleek. Her bountiful vocabulary and grammatical canny are on full display, giving the stories a voice of confidence that thoughtfully crafts each scene. Individually, the stories are lovely drops of melancholy. Together, they work in tremendous harmony, elevating Patient, Female from a compilation of good stories to a truly cohesive collection.
While most of the stories work to string together the thematic mesh, two of the stories are notable outliers. “Syllabus,” a clever bit of academic humor, is crowded and frantic compared to the other stories. The author of the deranged syllabus in question doesn’t have much room to breathe which both mutes the effect and heightens the contrast with the other stories. Similarly, in “Spin,” a stylistic departure from the bulk of the collection, four girls are guided by an omnipotent and omnipresent narrator through a board game that seems to be an unsettling mash-up of Life and Jumanji. These two stories are interesting on their own, but in Patient, Female, they play like a Bad Bunny song showing up in a Maggie Rogers playlist – certainly not bad, but perhaps tonally asynchronous.
Past the brief digression, Patient, Female reaches its climax with “The Living Dead,” an excellent story about a mother and her two daughters, all three of whom are pushed off their metaphorical jungle gyms by the death of their husband/father, all three looking for each other, and themselves, at a Halloween street party. The women of Patient, Female have all found their own ways to manage the splinters in their lives, but it is here among the zombie-princesses and techno-pirates, that they find a way to take back control.
The final two stories realize this conclusion, as the women we meet wrestle with their burdens and finally gain the upper hand. In “Resurrection Hockey,” middle-aged friends are energized by an old coach who gets their high school field hockey team back together to work on some unfinished business. They have every reason to write her off, just like they have every reason to write themselves off, but they regain control of their story when they realize they’re the ones holding the pens.
“Patient, Female,” the eponymous finale, brings the collection to a brilliant conclusion. A woman, beset by her father and her past delinquency, takes back control of her life by working as a demonstrational female patient on whom medical students can practice their exams and bedside manner. Life has pushed her around more than most, but she has found a grip and has started to pull. Her burdens will not disappear, nor will they for any of the women of the collection, but they’re not asking for special treatment. They’re asking to be seen, to be heard, and to be given a chance to find their way without everyone else in their lives piling onto their efforts, expecting them to shoulder the full load. Patient, Female tells these stories with care and understanding. Schumacher’s women will not let themselves stay down; they show us how to lift ourselves up and climb back onto life’s jungle gym, one tubular metal rung at a time.
FICTION
Patient, Female
By Julie Schumacher
Milkweed Editions
Published May 5, 2026
