“Half-Lives” Exalts the Middle-Aged Woman-Artist https://ift.tt/7vWb2Jl
“Once upon a time there was no sex, but sex was everywhere….” So begins Lynn Schmeidler’s clever debut short story collection, Half-Lives, recently published by Autumn House Press.
Half-Lives is often experimental and occasionally fairy-tale-like, but the dark woods in these stories may be women’s bodies. Or perhaps they are our current political landscape, with its overturned landmark laws and pronatalism (though not referenced, it’s what’s really scary here, and can’t help but lurk in the back of your mind as you read). Many of these tales, after all, dare to center women who choose not to be mothers. The conflict between motherhood and art is, in fact, a recurring and vital element in many of them, and there’s not a trad mom in sight.
“Sex was Everywhere,” the opening story, evokes the innocence, mystery, and dawning awareness — sexual and otherwise — of growing up in the 1970s. Schmeidler neatly summons that pre-cell phone era with references to Dr. Pepper, Wella Balsam, “wrap skirts that flew open in the wind,” sideburns, and, of course, serial rapist and murderer Ted Bundy. “Sex was Everywhere” explores youthful blossoming with lush prose, breathlessness, and a building movement that brings to mind Maxine Swann’s classic short story, “Flower Children.” Like Swann, Schmeidler evokes poetry with repetition of form, rhythm, and a reliance on the senses: “Sex was in the heat that gathered under the ceiling of the gym — when you climbed the rope to the top, you came down smelling of it.”
As Half-Lives progresses, the main characters in the stories seem to slowly age, and that contributes to the impression that this is, in fact, a unified collection. “Happy Birthday,” which is situated later in the book, begins on the morning of an unnamed protagonist’s 51st birthday — which turns out to also be the day her husband walks out on her. As her birthday unfolds, she unexpectedly receives an even more surprising gift: the invisibility of middle-aged womanhood.
Her dry cleaner — the one she’s patronized for years — looks at her with blank eyes when she enters his store. Even her own computer blinks “at her as if to say, What do I care if you never finish this story? It’s about a middle-aged woman. I could give a fuck. Yawn.”
“It’s so liberating,” a peer tells her over lunch, enthusing over the merits of being a fifty-something female. “Not to be an object anymore. You can stare. The unobserved observer.” Indeed, by the end of the story, she accepts and even lays claim to what her cloak of middle-aged invisibility can offer. First, she cuts in line in a coffee shop; later, she seizes the only table at a pizza joint: “With a swish of her arm, she pushed the man’s tray onto the floor and replaced it with hers. He jumped up, furious. She watched as he quickly took her in — gray roots to bunions — and his anger melted to embarrassment.” The story ends as she hands him his coat and takes his seat. Chew on that one for a minute.
The protagonists of all these stories are women. Usually, they are artists. Rarely are they mothers. Always, they are opinionated and strong. Schmeidler creates uncompromising female characters, many of whom also possess an arch sense of humor.
Schmeidler, a Pushcart Prize nominee and the winner of BOMB’s 2023 Fiction Contest for her story “InventEd” (included in Half-Lives), writes poetry and fiction that explores feminism and artistic genius. Her poetry collection, History of Gone (Veliz Books), muses on the life of Barbara Newhall Follett, who wrote her first novel at the age of eight and had it published by Knopf four years later, only to later disappear after an unsatisfactory marriage. Disappearing is a theme Schmeidler seems drawn to.
Reading Half-Lives, I couldn’t help but think Schmeidler’s protagonists must reflect her. Surely she must be an artsy badass, too, right? In the eponymous story “Half-Lives,” she even seems to leave confessional breadcrumbs, writing, “There is a part of us that always wishes to come clean. A murderer leaves behind a fingerprint, a bank robber writes his demands on the back of his subpoena, a doctor tells a patient she’ll be all right but doesn’t blink once.”
But mid-book, I questioned the indisputable similarity of all of her main characters. Can she really do that? Why, I wondered, are they all so much alike? Yet, before the end — even before the marvelous and eerie “Deep Hollow Close” braided all of her fictional threads and made bizarre sense of everything — Schmeidler had won me over. Why not write all of these stories from the perspective of a creative, dissatisfied woman? They’re good. Schmeidler, like her characters, has the confidence to do what she wants — and succeed.
These stories, however, are best read one at a time. The experimental and powerfully surreal “The Future was Vagina Forward,” the conceptual performance within “Plural Like the Universe,” and the masterfully crafted “Half-Lives” all require space, like any work of art, for best viewing and appreciation. Schmeidler, their creator, has — by design — put a lot in there to contemplate.
FICTION Half-Lives
By Lynn Schmeidler
Autumn House Press
Published March 26, 2024
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