First Aid for Choking Victims is a collection of mostly longer short stories set in rural areas around Western Massachusetts and the Hudson Valley of New York. These stories are interested in mapping how characters confront and react to deaths in their lives, awakenings to love and sexuality, their place in rural America, their own shortcomings as people, and their struggles with mental health. The collection has similarities in style and approach to Tessa Hadley's psychological focus in Bad Dreams and Other Stories and Elizabeth Strout's rural visions in her collection Anything is Possible.
The seven stories in this collection are mainly about love, sexuality, grief, and the difficulty of finding meaning in lived experience. The title story features the teenage daughter of a couple suffering the aftermath of a miscarriage as she navigates her parents crumbling marriage, her mother's new friend who may be much more than that, the attentions of the neighbor boy down the road, and her own decisions about religion and sexuality. Another story follows a high school basketball player trying to reconstruct the events leading up to his best friend's death after he is hit by a train, possibly as a suicide, which may point to ways in which he was hiding his sexuality. Another story features a man who cannot swim and has hidden this fact his entire life, including from his new girlfriend, who has invited him up to her family's lake house for the weekend to swim.
Other stories in this collection follow a girl fantasizing about an older boy at a beach, a young college student trying to navigate a first relationship, an intern at a local news station grappling with his own complicity in the way the reporter warps the stories he's telling, and a college girl trying to decide whether to stay with her boyfriend on a visit to meet his parents in the country, during which she reveals a secret.
