What I'm Reading: Near Strangers
By Marian Crotty
What I’m Reading is a monthly feature of So Much Stuff, offering brief excerpts from contemporary novels and story collections you’ll want to add to your TBR pile.
I’m finding it pretty hard to go about business as usual on November 6th, 2024, but here we are. Marion Crotty’s story collection, Near Strangers, won the 2023 Autumn House Fiction Prize. Emma Snyder, the owner of The Ivy Bookshop, describes the book as “raw and particular and surprising,” and I wholeheartedly agree. Snyder also notes that these stories reminded her of “how inevitable it is that we fail to reach each other fully, and how essential it is to try.” A sentiment for today, if there ever was one.
Here’s the beginning of the opening story “Halloween.”
My grandmother Jan had fucked-up ideas about love. This was something anyone who had spent about five minutes with her understood. She had been married three times—once to my grandfather and twice to a guy named David who I remember as a quiet gray-bearded man with a motorcycle, who had also broken into her duplex and set fire to the wicker patio furniture that she’d always kept in the sunroom. When I asked if she’d been afraid of him, she shrugged. “Sure. Sometimes.” In her mind, love was an undertaking that required constant vigilance and bravery, and when she spoke about her relationships, I often thought of a woman I’d seen on YouTube trying to explain why she had been raising the tiger cub that eventually mauled her. “We loved each other,” the woman said. “I don’t expect anyone to understand.”
But when it came to Erika, the girl who had recently broken my heart, after what was admittedly just one relatively chaste summer together, Jan was my ideal audience: sympathetic, almost always available, and the only person in my life who thought that getting back together with Erika was both advisable and likely to happen.
You can find Near Strangers HERE. Happy reading!