If the Body Allows It
Stories
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
Longlisted for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection
Winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction, If the Body Allows It is divided into six parts and framed by the story of Marie, a woman in her thirties living in Newark, New Jersey. Suffering from a chronic autoimmune illness, she also struggles with guilt over the overdose and death of her father, whom she feels she betrayed at the end of his life. The stories within the frame—about failed marriages, places of isolation and protection, teenage mistakes, and forging a life in the aftermath—are the stories the narrator writes after she meets and falls in love with a man whose grief mirrors her own. If the Body Allows It explores illness and its aftermath, guilt and addiction, and the relationships the characters form after they’ve lost everyone else, including themselves.
Introspective, devastating, and funny, If the Body Allows It grapples with the idea that life is always on the brink of never being the same again.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Cummins's impressive debut, a novel in stories, follows Marie, a writer in her mid-30s with an auto-immune disease. The narrative begins with Marie's doctor advising her to avoid pregnancy due to her illness. This advice and Marie's health proceed to dismantle her relationship with long-term boyfriend Ralph as well as a later relationship with Patrick, a younger man who Marie feels bonded to through their shared loss of a loved one to addiction Marie "lost father to drugs" years before and feels her indifference betrayed him. Marie's interludes bring together other stories, presented as ones written by Marie herself, that poignantly deal with disease, pregnancy, and addiction: in "The Beast," a woman finds out her husband's secret addiction has resulted in thousands of dollars in credit card debt; in "Countergirls," a woman navigates the rocky relationship between her husband and daughter, an opioid addict; in Michigan, a wife begins an affair with the local playboy and drunk; in "Higher Power," a recovering addict reconnects with his ex-wife who has multiple sclerosis; and in "Water Burial," a woman confides to her sister that both her body and romantic relationship are slowly deteriorating. Each story is riveting and climactic, and Marie's narration effectively ties them together. Cummins's innovative work delivers well-crafted stories, vivid characters, and unsettling emotional gravitas.
