Brown's imaginative, fierce collection of 12 stories (her 10th book, after The End of Youth
) evokes the painful detritus of lesbian love affairs long over and the trickiness of memory. Heartbreak and guilt fragment narrative and remembrance in the title story. A nameless woman unravels her tale as she tells it: "We had coffee... Wait—I
would have had coffee... you were drinking mineral water... or maybe fresh squeezed orange juice"). In the cryptic two-page vignette "A Ventriloquist," a woman attributes the "hideous, terrible things" she says to a cruel, controlling higher power. "Your relationships take place in your head," an ex-lover told the self-lacerating narrator of "Trying to Say," which catalogues the things the narrator might have said to her girlfriend—but never did. In "The Others," another iteration of the tortured, rueful lover's lament, Brown depicts the emotional fallout of unfaithful girlfriends with gory, disturbing metaphors. In prose at once spare and unruly, Brown summons obsessive narrators hopelessly mired in an ever-shifting past. (Mar.)
