Intimacies by Lucy Caldwell: Short Story Collection review
Thoughts: Short story collections are so difficult because they usually end up feeling somewhat unbalanced. There's the blockbuster short stories that necessitate the volume in the first place and then there are stories that feel like they exist to fill space in the book. I think this is part of the problem with selling the general public on short fiction and collections and anthologies (where this feels like an even more pronounced issue). I can say all these harsh things about collections here because Caldwell manages to bypass these pitfalls beautifully in her 2020 collection, Intimacies.
This is a tight collection of eleven stories that all center mothers with young children navigating motherhood and their larger place in the universe. Now, this probably sounds like a strange collection for me in particular to be raving about as it's a topic I find personally sticky and also have no firsthand experience of myself. I didn't honestly know that was the theme of this collection until I was reading it. It was simply the first available of Caldwell's work at my library, and I knew she was coming to visit our class. We'd been provided 2 stories to read in advance (including one of my newfound favorite short stories ever, "Hamlet, a love story," which you can read online), but I wanted to really do my homework. So it should say something that Caldwell managed to capture my wrapt attention on a subject I don't gravitate towards. And she does it with—I was going to say mastery of her craft, though now the memory of her lambasting that as a critical crutch of praise now thrums through my head. She posits that she's simply in service of the stories, not a master of anything—a deep understanding of her craft on every possible level. They are all focused on feelings, emotions, and people over plot but still have that necessary pulse of vitality through a number of careful choices. There's the prose itself, the construction of the volume finding the right rhythms of longer and shorter stories to stop the drag that sometimes happens, and her ability to write similar scenarios and subject matter that feel revelatory every single time. I understand why she's regarded as perhaps the best living short story writer by so many of my professors.
On the theme of Caldwell making me reevaluate my opinions of certain things, her use of second person entirely won me over. I'm the kind of person who typically finds out something is written in the second person and immediately puts it down. I almost did that with the first story in this collection (it's a mix of first and second person stories), but I luckily had the overruling knowledge that she was coming to visit class, so I pushed through and realized that second person isn't inherently bad, it's just that most writers don't know what to do with it. And done without total control, it is a hot mess. Anyone who wants to experiment with the second person should be required to study Caldwell. I can't wait to continue reading her other collections, and thus far, introducing me to Caldwell is the greatest gift this masters has offered me.
Overall: 4.5
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