#570 Grendel’s Mother- Katherine Heiny

#570 Grendel’s Mother- Katherine Heiny

This started out as a pretty straight forward story. Maya and Rhodes are having their first child. As for the title of the story: after their first ultrasound they went to Rhodes’ parents’ house and told them the good news. Rhodes’ wacky mother wanted to name the child Thor if it was a boy, or Grendel if it was a girl. 

Meanwhile, Maya’s stepsister Magellan just broke up with her boyfriend and was devastated.

“Was there any breakup more painful than an unexplained one…It could haunt you for months, even for years, the unknown reason, and take on a nearly mythical importance, until you forgot, or almost forgot, that the truly important thing was that someone you wanted to be with no longer wanted to be with you.”

Like I said, this started out straight forward, then a lot of stuff got dumped on it. Magellan moved in with Maya and Rhodes; they ran into Rhodes first love; witnessed her OB-GYN breaking up with his girlfriend; Maya found out that Rhodes had a brother that died when he was only one day old; She caught Magellan and her ex-boyfriend having sex on her bed, etc.

It isn’t chaotic as much as it’s random. Some of these things make sense for the story but others just don’t add anything that I can see. I guess an argument can be made that all this stuff happens just before a big life moment to test you to see if you are ready, but that’s thin at best. It’s too busy for me—my favorite part is calling the unborn child Grendel.

Rating: 8-7-5-5 Total= 25

#542 The Rhett Butlers- Katherine Heiny

#542 The Rhett Butlers- Katherine Heiny

There is nothing more depressing than a story about a forty-year old teacher having a sexual relationship with one of his seventeen-year old students. But here it is. What starts out as an innocent crush, turns into this girl’s first real boyfriend, only it’s not real because she can’t tell anyone.

She, of course is naïve, but as it turns out she is the more mature of the two and she breaks it off as soon as she realizes that this can’t be a real relationship. He is naïve too, naïve to think that this is not a creepy thing to do. What’s more creepy is that he tells another teacher about the affair, and it seems to be a non-story between them.

This is just something that happened in her life, and she seems to have let it go, being more upset at her slipping grades than being taken advantage of by an older man. The readers of this story will probably be more outraged than the narrator, or maybe they’ll be more like the mother, and pretend she doesn’t see anything.

Rating: 8-6-6-6 Total= 26

#511 Thoughts of a Bridesmaid- Katherine Heiny

#511 Thoughts of a Bridesmaid- Katherine Heiny

The title of this one pretty much explains it. The thoughts of this bridesmaid, Fern, are broken down into easy to read topics. These are snapshots of all the little moments that happen between the bride and the bridesmaid during the wedding weekend.

Fern and Haley have been friends since college, Fern being the less popular, less outgoing, less beautiful—at least according to her account. Touching at times, funny at others—never being a bridesmaid myself, I can only guess this is a typical experience. I did laugh pretty hard at her description of herself in the bridesmaid dress:

“I look at myself in the mirror. I look like an unsuccessful prostitute.”

Rating: 8-7-8-6 Total= 29

#486 Cranberry Relish- Katherine Heiny

#486 Cranberry Relish- Katherine Heiny

Josie, a married woman with two kids and a nice happy life has been sleeping with a man she met on facebook. Now this man is breaking up with her for a woman he met on twitter. The irony of all this isn’t lost on Josie of course who has felt strange about the whole order of things anyway:

“We’re doing all this backwards…their minds had fallen in love before their bodies did and what if their bodies got all stubborn and wouldn’t fall in line?”

If Heiny wasn’t an exceptional storyteller, this is where I’d be saying how saturated I’ve become with tales of infidelity, or I’d say how un-clever the love-in-the-age-of-social-media story line is. If I did say all those things, I’d have a lot of evidence to back my statement up. However, even when I don’t get blown away by her story subjects, I still really enjoy reading Heiny’s stories. Perhaps it’s the matter-of-fact nonjudgmental take on morality issues, or that even when there seems to be little emotion in the characters it’s less about being cold and more about not wallowing in other people’s feelings.

This may be my least favorite in this collection so far, but I’ll still take it over the majority of other stories with similar topics.

Rating: 8-7-7-7 Total= 29

#465 Dark Matter- Katherine Heiny

#465 Dark Matter- Katherine Heiny

Maya is having an affair with her mentor and boss. They began the affair the night she was celebrating her engagement to Rhodes, her fiancé. This is a kind of last fling affair, probably.

She has a theory that the smarter the man, the more likely it is that after sex, as part of a pillow-talk ritual, he will spout off some kind of inane factoid. That a clear mind inspires this kind of knowledge. The story here is glued together with these little facts, like dark matter that glues together the universe.

This story is less about the affair than about relationship dynamics between men and woman. Maya has had men tell her facts her whole life, like she needs to be taught something, but the one time she gives a fact, its truthfulness is questioned. Heiny’s style is impeccable and light. There is a seamless flow to the dialogue and well articulated shape to the story.

Rating: 9-6-7-8 Total= 30

#423 Blue Heron Bridge- Katherine Heiny

#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?”

Rating: 8-8-8-8 Total= 32

#396 Single, Carefree, Mellow- Katherine Heiny

#396 Single, Carefree, Mellow- Katherine Heiny

This story is about loss, dependence, love, worth. Maya knows that her dog is dying, and she also knows that her relationship should probably end soon, maybe. It’s a battle in her mind between the unconditional love of a dog and the complicated love between humans.

This is a no fault story, there is no antagonist, just the thoughts of Maya. We root for her to find that something that will settle het mind down. We don’t know, as readers either whether she should break up with her boyfriend. They seem somewhat happy, he is good to her, his family loves her. It’s a struggle we all deal with, is there such a thing as unconditional love?

One thing I found really interesting was this litmus test idea below, it’ll stick with me. I’m not sure if I know what my defining story is.

“Maya had a theory that everyone had a story that somehow defined them, both the good and the bad, and that these stories should be shared early on in relationships. If the other person appreciated the story, that meant you should proceed with the relationship, and if the other person failed to understand the depth of the story, or were judgmental, then there was basically no point in further contact.”

#375 How to Give the Wrong Impression- Katherine Heiny

#375 How to Give the Wrong Impression- Katherine Heiny

If a modern phenomenon can be considered an age-old tale, then this is it: urban apartment living with unrequited love. This goes beyond the “friend zone,” this is “friend purgatory.”

Gwen and Boris live together, but not in that way. They are apartment mates. To the outside world they look like much more, and in their own minds they each secretly wish to be. They don’t deny rumors or insinuations that they are in a relationship, but they won’t outright imply it either. To each other, they try their hardest to hide their feelings to the point that:

“you worry you’re becoming a pathological liar.”

They get jealous of each other’s romantic lives, but even that gets more scarce with time. “You don’t have boyfriends anymore, and these days you don’t even have dates.” It’s a game of relationship chicken; how many hints can you drop and hope that the other finally makes the first move?

Rating: 8-7-9-9 Total= 33

#362 The Dive Bar- Katherine Heiny

#362 The Dive Bar- Katherine Heiny

This is the first story in the debut book by Katherine Heiny, Single, Carefree, Mellow. This is my first time reading anything by Heiny…she had me at Dive Bar. I like dive bars, I like drinking at dive bars…hell I just like drinking. Of course this story isn’t really about a dive bar.

What I do like about this story is the setting, New York City. There are a lot of writers that are from, have lived in, or pretend to understand NYC. Not all of them succeed. Having moved away from NY just a year ago, and recently returned, reading about the bar and singles scene in Manhattan makes my heart twitch just a bit.

It’s small things, but familiar things, like Sasha and Monique deciding where to drink by walking towards each other on Broadway, and just stop in whichever bar they meet in front of.

“Sarah looks up and sees Monique down the block, and has that thrill you get from seeing someone familiar on the streets of New York, like looking through a box of old paperbacks at a garage sale and finding a copy of a novel you love.”

This collection is about being single. Heiny’s writing style is easy and treats this topic without pretense. So far, she gracefully avoids stereotypes of gender norms, which is hard when dealing with such a topic.

Now I want to go hit up a dive bar and talk with a friend about topics, both meaningful and not.

Rating: 8-8-8-8 Total= 32