Come to Me: Stories - Hardcover

Bloom, Amy

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0060182369 ISBN 13: 9780060182366

Publisher: Harpercollins, 1993

Synopsis

A first collection of short stories features tales of psychiatrists crossing professional boundaries, a small girl in need of love, a frightened father in need of redemption, and wives who become mistresses.

About this title

Review:

Amy Bloom's 1993 collection, Come to Me, is filled with yearning mysteries of romantic and familial love that are far more complex than the phrase "love story" allows. The first sentence of the first story, "Love Is Not a Pie," evinces the contradictions, layers, and interconnections of her narrator's existence--and hooks the reader entirely. "In the middle of the eulogy at my mother's boring and heart-breaking funeral, I began to think about calling off the wedding." The title phrase means exactly what it says: Lila's mother didn't have a finite amount of affection and was lucky not to be forced to choose between love's accepted forms and a more unusual one: "People think that it can't be that way, but it can. You just have to find the right people." Lila realizes that she needs to get out of her engagement because she isn't ready for normality.

The unusual pervades these stories, and Bloom handles some outsized events with delicacy and humor. In "Sleepwalking," a new widow sends her stepson away after they've slept together, because she wants him to have a normal life. The author makes us aware that there's something terrible and foolhardy about this woman's decision. Several other characters find themselves in equally desperate situations, their only consolation being recollections of earlier bliss, often sensual: "It was like nothing else in my life, that river of love that I could dip into and leave and return to once more and find it still flowing." For them, memories of past happiness makes present sorrow bearable.

About the Author:

Amy Bloom is the author of two novels, three collections of short stories, and a nominee for both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. She has written for The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, among many other publications, and has won a National Magazine Award. She lives in Connecticut and is Wesleyan University's Writer-in-Residence.

About this edition

• Publisher: Harpercollins
• Publication date: 1993
• ISBN 10: 0060182369
• ISBN 13: 9780060182366
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 177