My Escapee
Stories
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- $19.99
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
ANew York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice
Delicate and assured, the stories in My Escapee illuminate unseen forces in women’s lives: the shameful thought, the stifled hope, the subterranean stresses of marriage, friendship, and family. Grappling with lost memories, escaped time, the longing to be loved, and the instinct for autonomy, the stories peer inside their characters’ minds to their benign delusions, their triumphs and defeats.
A girl taking a test for admittance to a selective school finds that what she loves most of all is the ordinary. A lonely young woman, sick of being sick, swaps places with her nurse. A college student deploys her more charming roommate to discover the secret rituals of an all-male club on campus. And in the title story, a woman in a nursing home receives mysterious missives from her longtime lover recalling fragments of their old life together.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Selected by Jhumpa Lahiri for the Grace Paley Prize in Short Fiction, Vallianatos's debut collection features female protagonists who are smart, flawed, and alienated but striving for connection. In the title story, Genevieve, an elderly lesbian living in a nursing home and dealing with the confusion of age and memory, longs for her lover, who seems to be traveling around the world. "It's dizzying, the way the past unfolds in crystal bits, and the present's this faulty plateau," Genevieve says. While the story relies on an overused plot device, moments of insight make it successful. "Sink Home" focuses on middle-aged women in the midst of affairs; in "Salvo" a young woman marries on a whim; a group of college girls attend a fraternity's ball in "Celebrants"; and a young girl, in "Examination," bails on a gifted-child test. The knock-out story "Posthumous Fragments of Veronica Penn" is representative of the collection's strengths. The story, assembled as a montage of memory, leaps in time and logic. It's disorienting at first, but slowly a collage of Veronica is formed. She realizes, slowly, how hard it is to comprehend herself and her own actions, let alone understand the depths of anyone else. It's mesmerizing to see it unfurl. Vallianatos writes with insight, humor, and elegance.
