What She Left Me: Stories and a Novella - Hardcover

Doenges, Judy

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0874519373 ISBN 13: 9780874519372

Publisher: Middlebury College Pr, 1999

Synopsis

These fine stories of marginal, blue-collar people, many of them lesbian or gay, living difficult lives far removed from urban glamor or the fast lane of pop or gay culture, are unsentimentally yet sensitively told by Judy Doenges. They render well the humanity and the sadness of some of contemporary fiction's most unforgettable characters.

About this title

About the Author

JUDY DOENGES has taught writing at several universities, and has published stories in numerous literary journals, including The Georgia Review, Green Mountain Review, and Nimrod.

Reviews

Winner of Bread Loaf's 1998 Bakeless Prize for Fiction, this collection of nine stories and a novella situates diverse characters in hard times, but supports them with an engaging tenderness and a succor of edgy humor. In "Crooks," Ceil is a bright teenage girl with thieving, pistol-toting bad-boy companions who lust after another girl, Jody. Ceil rebels not by merely defying her parents, but by mapping an odd, poignant course of self-destruction, sabotage and vulnerability amid her peers. She takes condoms out of Jody's wallet and pokes them full of pinholes, and sweet-talks a grungy biker out of his knife, with which she cuts herself. A sense of menace builds throughout the story, underscoring the narrator's sharp observations about her companions and herself. Other tales offer a young couple's melancholy adventures in Las Vegas ("The Money Stays, the People Go") and an inexperienced woman making an awkward debut on Chicago's lesbian dating scene ("Incognito"). In "The Whole Numbers of Families," another lesbian character, whose relationship with her lover is foundering, clarifies her sense of family while visiting her dying aunt. The title story, while frank and polished, at times feels too studied, too neatly arranged; the heroine's breakdown predictably parallels her mother's disturbing legacy. The novella, "God of Gods," is a moving meditation featuring a six-foot-six butcher in a Chicago supermarket, Odin Tollefson, and his fraught coming-out as a gay man in the midst of the racial upheavals of the early 1970s. Elegantly contextualizing Odin's sensitive, tentative coming to terms with his sexuality within a gritty, working-class urban setting, the narrative offers a respectful, finely tuned perspective on blue-collar gay life. This novella, like the strongest of Doenges's other tales, sturdily depicts identity struggles in which the characters' inner lives are given as much tough contemplation as their surroundings. (Aug.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

A debut collection, mostly set in the Midwest, that won the Bread Loaf Writers Conferences 1998 Bakeless Literary Publication Prize for Fiction. Doengess characters seem nondescript at first meeting; actually, though, theyre nearly all misfits in some secret or obvious way. Sandra, in the title story, is a good example. Having nursed her alcoholic mother through the final stages of the cancer that eventually killed her, shes unprepared to face life on her own and mopes about the house sorting through the useless paraphernalia her mother left behind. MIB is a sad womans recollection of her difficult childhood, in the course of which her only escape from her drunken mothers miseries was in the company of a neighborhood boy who, like herself, grew up to become a homosexual; years later hes an AIDS activist and brings her into the movement. Crime figures prominently in Doengess imagination: the teenagers of Crooks are garden-variety juvenile delinquents who steal and sleep around, while the pregnant woman of Solved, arrested by bounty hunters for a bad debtto her bail bondsmangoes into labor while in custody. The unhappy husband of Occidental goes to a local bar to tie one on after his wife throws him out, but his unhappiness has deeper roots: hes a Vietnam vet still haunted by the war. The best piece here is the novella,God of Gods, about a closeted gay butchers reaction to the race riots and political turmoil of Chicago in the early 1970s. Vivid yet understated, it captures the fear of a society in the thrall of violent and sudden change. A good beginning that needs to be pushed further: Doenges works her subjects well but not hard enough to earn for them the weight that they could have. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Doenges won the 1998 Bakeless Literary Publication Prize for fiction with these short stories and novella, all of them about the tiny nerves that connect relationships and the fine interstices that widen to drive people apart. Many of the characters are saturated in alcohol, from the elegantly slim, tanned mother sipping endless martinis to the young, wild college student chugging beers during summer break while her boyfriend inventories their stock of stolen stereos. Booze-steeped perceptions and memories permeate these pieces, giving a gauzy, shifting-edged quality to their glimpses of people reaching out and not quite touching. Marginal may be the best overall descriptor for these characters, who, whether working class or elite, and despite outward appearances, roil with inner turmoil. Certainly, the sad poignancy and the dark humor of their lives touch us deeply. Whitney Scott

Edition details

• Publisher: Middlebury College Pr
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0874519373
• ISBN 13: 9780874519372
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 183