A Manual for How to Love Us
Stories
-
- $9.99
-
- $9.99
Publisher Description
A debut, interlinked collection of stories exploring the primal nature of women’s grief—offering insight into the profound experience of loss and the absurd ways in which we seek control in an unruly world.
Seamlessly shifting between the speculative and the blindingly real, balancing the bizarre with the subtle brutality of the mundane, A Manual for How to Love Us is a tender portrait of women trying their best to survive, love, and find genuine meaning in the aftermath of loss.
In these unconventional and unpredictably connected stories, Erin Slaughter shatters the stereotype of the soft-spoken, sorrowful woman in distress, queering the domestic and honoring the feral in all of us. In each story, grieving women embrace their wildest impulses as they attempt to master their lives: one woman becomes a “gazer” at a fraternity house, another slowly moves into her otherworldly stained-glass art, a couple speaks only in their basement’s black box, and a thruple must decide what to do when one partner disappears.
The women in Erin Slaughter’s stories suffer messy breaks, whisper secrets to the ghosts tangled in the knots of their hair, eat raw meat to commune with their inner wolves, and build deadly MLM schemes along the Gulf Coast.
Set across oft-overlooked towns in the American South, A Manual for How to Love Us spotlights women who are living on the brink and clinging to its precipitous edge. Lyrical and surprisingly humorous, A Manual for How to Love Us is an exciting debut that reveals the sticky complications of living in a body, in all its grotesquerie and glory.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Poet Slaughter's gritty debut fiction collection (after The Sorrow Festival) follows protagonists grappling with longing and loss. In "Anywhere," narrator Andrea reunites with her friend Zell after five years apart and accepts Zell's invitation to go on a road trip. The trip's parameters are vague at the outset; Andrea, who's long been in love with Zell, is excited for the chance to "run away" with her, and Andrea wonders if Zell is trying to evade someone. Not only is the trip lacking in fun, though, it ends in gunfire. "You Too Can Cure Your Life" follows Melody, who peddles a dubious and possibly harmful medicine called Life Cure online and meets a woman from Guatemala who's been taking Life Cure, and whose partner left her after her cancer diagnosis. In "Nest," two sisters cope with the recent death of their father. The 16-year-old narrator dates an older guy, while her younger sister, Kate, doesn't eat. Meanwhile, the narrator thinks their father's ghost has taken up residence in her hair, but doesn't tell Kate. Taken as a whole, the amount of suffering faced by the characters makes the book feel one-note, though there are plenty of inviting lyrical descriptions (here's Andrea from "Anywhere," recounting the trip: "Miles and miles of night, the darkness like a fleece blanket"). Those who can power through the pervading gloom will appreciate Slaughter's storytelling chops.
