In \u201cOrigin Story,\u201d a piece that\u2019s less about looking back than moving forward, the female protagonist muses: \u201cFreedom wasn\u2019t to be found in words but in being alone\u2026thinking thoughts that would not appear in her stories because they were shameful in their intimacy and small in scope, the product of a lack of imagination or will or knowledge or something methodical that gave rise to what men wrote.\u201d Vallianatos\u2019 second collection is shot through with startling revelations like these. Offering only the thinnest scrim of plot\u2014in one story, a husband contemplates ending an affair while his wife considers embarking on one, though neither character appears to know what the other is planning, while in another a teenage boy suddenly falls in love with his mom\u2019s friend for no reason\u2014these stories reject convention. They end abruptly and sometimes tantalizingly opaquely: In \u201cThis Isn\u2019t the Actual Sea,\u201d the narrator\u2019s friend makes a film about an incident involving a poodle that ruptured their friendship. A screening brings them back together without resolving their conflict, and the narrator\u2019s final thought is, \u201cI could hear the poodle barking and smell something coming off [my friend], a stab of deodorant, a sort of unnatural hope and exertion, and I felt then the terror and promise of friendship, the daily encounter with what the other dares to be.\u201d Some readers will surely be put off by Vallianatos\u2019 rejection of \u201csomething methodical\u201d while others will thrill to her characters\u2019 intimate, profound revelations: In \u201cDogwood,\u201d a mother and writer offers, \u201cI love doubt. I\u2019m not sure how I feel about certainty. Certainty is like a closed door. Doubt leaves a way open.\u201d<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In \u201cOrigin Story,\u201d a piece that\u2019s less about looking back than moving forward, the female protagonist muses: \u201cFreedom wasn\u2019t to be found in words but in being alone\u2026thinking thoughts that would not appear in her stories because they were shameful in their intimacy and small in scope, the product of a lack of imagination or […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":1870,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1869","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interesting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1869"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1869"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1869\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1870"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1869"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1869"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1869"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}