#423 Blue Heron Bridge- Katherine Heiny
This story just has a natural humor to it. Not that the
topic was all that funny, a woman having an affair with a neighbor, but the
breezy style it’s written, somehow softens our judgment of that situation, and
we get a story told by someone that could be a friend of ours.
Nina is very self aware about her infidelity and what kind
of person it makes her but she does it anyway.
“Oh, it was horrible to have a teenager’s emotions and a
forty-year-old’s body. It was humiliating. It was depressing. It was degrading.
It made her feel alive to the very tips of her toes.”
Like I said, there is nothing naturally amusing about this
story, its just told very well. The humor is in the details. Like the name of
her neighbor—Bunny Pringle. “The most interesting thing about Bunny Pringle, in
Nina’s opinion, was that everyone always referred to her by both her first and
last name, like Darth Vader.”
Heiny has a very plaintive, matter of fact attitude towards
her character’s relationships that I find relieving. So many of the stories
I’ve read about relationships, infidelity, failed marriages are just so
weighty, or self-indulgent. This is just one person sitting at a bar saying:
“Guess what I did the other day?”
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