“Sad Grownups” Explores What Sadness Says About Life https://ift.tt/4f3rP5B
Some of the best writing these days can be found in literary magazines and small press publications. Amy Stuber’s debut, Sad Grownups, is a case in point. It is perceptive, inventive, surprising, and deeply humane. I binged these stories as if I were bingeing a dramedy (my preferred genre) on Netflix. I recognized so much of myself — so much of my own sensibility — in these stories and in these characters. In short, this collection is my jam.
The title, I think, is apt. Melancholy is a thread woven through each of the 17 stories in Sad Grownups. As I read, I couldn’t stop thinking of John Irving’s famous (infamous?) quote from The Hotel New Hampshire, that “Sorrow floats.” The sorrow floats here, too. It persists, bobs, surfaces and resurfaces — rides the waves, never lets up.
Of these 17 stories, 13 have been published previously in literary magazines, including The Missouri Review, Craft, Joyland, and others. It’s the perfect time to see them compiled. Stuber is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Missouri Review’s 2023 William Peden Prize in fiction and the 2021 Northwest Review Fiction Prize. She was runner-up for the 2022 CRAFT Short Fiction Prize. Her work received a special mention in Pushcart Prize XLIV: Best of the Small Presses, appeared on the Wigleaf Top 50 Very Short Fictions in 2021, was nominated for Best of the Net, and appeared in Best Small Fictions in 2020 and 2023.
Many of Stuber’s characters are adults and parents, with an awareness of the grief that goes along with growing up, rearing children, and living and aging in our world. Our loved ones die, or we ourselves are dying. We seek love and connection but can’t find it; knowing other people, really knowing them, eludes us. We dream of other lives we could have lived. We, none of us, know how to be adults — how to do adulthood. Adulthood is a “wilderness.” Adults “carry their sad baby selves around with them their whole lives.” In addition to thinking of Irving while reading Sad Grownups, I was also reminded of what social psychologist and psychoanalyst Erich Fromm said: “One cannot be deeply responsive to the world without being saddened very often.”
In “Camp Heather,” sixty-year-old Heather works as a counselor at a religious camp. When the boys in her charge chant her name, she thinks about “all the Heathers then, the people she could have been but wasn’t, the roller-skating Heather, the comb-in-back-pocket Heather, easy in the middle of a group of teenagers.” Though she craves things that will make her “swollen with being,” instead she “feels pulled down into grayness, into a zipper of time with each notch screaming to her: there goes some and there goes some more.”
In “Cinema,” a woman who works in an old downtown movie theater remembers her dead sons and pulls “a wheelbarrow of sorrow” behind her everywhere she goes. After the narrator’s father in “More Fun in the New World” dies by suicide, she and her mother embark on a road trip during which she equates “living beyond a parent who has chosen not to” with “walking after someone has cut off your feet.” And in “The Last Summer,” a middle-aged man with terminal cancer takes a boat ride on a lake with two sorority girls. When the water slaps against the side of their boat and flies into his face, he licks it off and thinks, “This tastes like sorrow.”
One of my favorite stories is the poignant “The Game,” in which two married couples play “Truth or Dare” at a dinner party. The story is taut, and secrets abound. One of the women, Sage, has cheated on her husband with the husband of the other couple, impulsively, after discovering her own husband cheating on her with the other wife. They play the game while stripped down to their underwear in the pool and are interrupted by their children. Sage yearns not to be sad but to be “strategically nothing,” to not feel “the pulse of want or worry or maybe melancholy.” Floundering, she captures something of the sorrow of a parent, too: “It’s impossible to know who to be after having children. You’re not who you were, but you’re not new either.” I know this to be painfully true.
Like me, Stuber is less interested in wallowing in sorrow than in exploring what sorrow says about life. Life as “a short sentence with a visible period.” Life as “things slipping further and further out of your grasp” or, alternatively, as “things racing closer toward you in an imminent-car-crash way.” Life as a “series of knitted-together indecencies.” I highlighted several of these achingly beautiful passages throughout my copy of Sad Grownups.
Regardless, there are no easy answers to this despondency, Stuber seems to be saying. The endings to these stories, these lives, are ambiguous. The sadness comes with the territory of adulthood. We must take the bitter — so much bitter! — with the sweet. But can there be joy in recognizing sorrow? Naming it? Living through it? Perhaps. After all, as Camp Heather tells us, a life unfurling is relentless, but it can also be beautiful.
FICTION SadGrownups By Amy Stuber
Stillhouse Press
Published October 8, 2024
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