This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things

June 1, 2024

Wood (Mrs. Hemingway), who has garnered award attention and won the BBC Short Story Prize for "Comorbidities," includes that story among the others in this collection. The stories explore women who break the bounds of societal expectations and refuse to comply, including an ex-wife who intentionally introduces stress during her ex-husband's wedding. Prepub Alert.

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August 12, 2024
The characters in this nuanced if slight collection from Wood (The Godless Boys) are loosely connected by themes of motherhood and the tensions brought about by having children. The narrator of “A/A/A/A,” separated from her husband, agrees to accompany her friend Marissa to Paris for the day, without telling her husband what she’s up to. Her secrecy leads her to ruminate about the limits of a parent’s obligations, prompting Marissa to respond, “We all want to leave. No one wants to stay. But they’re the grand love affair in the end. The kids.” In “Lesley, in Therapy,” the title character cuts her maternity leave short while dealing with postpartum depression. Her nanny, an older Jamaican woman, tells Lesley she’s “better off at work than wanting to dash the baby’s brains out on the kitchen counter.” In “Flatten the Curve,” set during the Covid-19 pandemic, Deborah navigates lockdown with her family and develops a crush on her neighbor, the father of her daughter’s best friend. Hints of consequential drama suffuse most of the stories, and the characters are deliciously complex, but too often the entries end abruptly. Ultimately, this one’s a bit underwhelming. Agent: Sarah Fuentes, United Talent Agency.

October 1, 2024
Wood's (Mrs. Hemingway, 2014) first story collection contains the BBC National Short Story Award-winning ""Comorbidities,"" in which a woman navigates having more sex with her husband while raising (worrying over) two small kids amidst climate catastrophe. ""This is why I'm not horny! I wanted to say, the world on fire is not arousing!"" Another of Wood's protagonists, happily separated, she thought, from her kids' father, is told by her best friend, ""We all want to leave. No one wants to stay. But they're the grand love affair, in the end. The kids. No one else."" The book's sole story not based in reality, ""Dino Moms"" concerns a ""scripted-reality TV show"" in which veterinarian moms live on a ranch with dinosaurs and sometimes get eaten by them. Wood's perceptive, funny writing and her characters, concerned about loving both their jobs and their children too much even as they worry their kids won't have a world to live in, make for a winning addition to recent, taboo-embracing motherhood fiction like Rachel Yoder's Nightbitch (2021) and Soldier Sailor (2023) by Claire Kilroy.

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November 1, 2024
A socially astute collection about the pleasures and perils of motherhood. Triangulating the roles that many women with children play--as mothers, wives, and professionals--these stories smartly ask whether women can successfully pull off all three. In "Comorbidities," winner of the BBC Short Story Prize, the narrator's love for her children comes at the price of her fierce desire for her husband. When they finally do share an intimate moment, she almost cries, contemplating "how much [they] had both lost, the price [they] had paid." In "Lesley, in Therapy," a woman suffering from extreme postpartum depression cuts short her parental leave, only to realize that work isn't the solution--not only because her job can't lift her malaise, but also because of the absence of real structural support for mothers. When Lesley complains about her work load, which is supposed to be lighter after having a baby, the therapist leading her company's Group Therapy for Returning Parents counsels her to "focus on the here and now, and what wecan change." "Weall want to leave," a woman in "A/A/A/A/" tells a friend who has just learned that her husband has left her for another woman. "No onewants to stay. But they're the grand love affair, in the end. The kids." While women bear the burden of family life in many of these stories--and some readers will surely experience PTSD reading "Flatten the Curve," about parenting through the Covid-19 lockdown--they're not saints. What's true horror, wonders the pregnant director in "Dracula at the Movies" as she cruelly manipulates her star into a good performance--being the victim, or the perpetrator? While a few stories get bogged down by elaborate, slightly boring work situations, this is a deft account of the huge toll of trying to have everything. A must-read for working mothers--for whom reading might be a luxury they can't afford.

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