Tag: romance

by James Wallace Harris, 8/6/26

At 74, my youngest friend is 60. It’s been years since I’ve socialized with a young person. And when I think of young people, I recall the fellow baby boomers when they were young, or maybe Gen Xers I watched growing up. I’m totally out of touch with recent generations. So when I read a short story like “Take Me to Kirkland” by Sarah Anderson and view modern youth from inside their head, it’s kind of a shock.

Anderson is a young woman from Gainesville, Florida, who is at the beginning of her writing career. Her first novel, Fallow, will be out in September.

Literary fiction is often a touch autobiographical, but you can never be sure. Is the unnamed narrator in “Take Me to Kirkland” made up, or does Anderson use herself or people she knows to paint her tale? Since I’ve sat through dozens of writing critiques in writing classes, I know some writers make things up, and some writers describe things they know. Generally, writers of genre fiction make things up, and literary writers use details from real life.

That’s why I like reading The Best American Short Story series. Reading each volume’s twenty stories feels like eavesdropping into people’s lives. And generally, they are unlike anyone I’ve known.

Luckily, the anthology includes notes from the contributors, so we get some clues about Anderson.

“Take Me to Kirkland” initially grew out of two main fragments.

The first piece to arrive was the scene of the narrator meeting Chloe and the intensity between them. My own breasts came in late, and one of my clearest memories from teenhood is the obsessive, desperate way I looked at other women’s bodies, like at any moment someone might jump from the bushes and announce a winner. That moment of sizing up by the mailbox was my way into the scene, and then the friendship came in a series of images: the cutting of the lemon, girl underwater, the trampoline.

The second piece was the section about childhood misunderstandings. I was a deeply anxious child, and that anxiety was made so much worse by all the things I didn’t understand about the world. I just had this vague sense of how much I didn’t know, and it terrified me. Perhaps because of this, and having made it to the other side, I take a particular joy in collecting other people’s stories of the misunderstandings they had well into adulthood. Like the narrator, I truly believed for a long, long time that Al Gore was only his last name.

It eventually became clear to me that the two fragments were connected, and I spent another year figuring out how to stitch together a narrative around them. Once it started to take shape, the story became a vehicle for a collection of other strangenesses, things that used to or still unsettle me in ways I struggle to articulate, all the ways the world never does actually make sense even after you grow up, and all the stories we tell each other and ourselves to try to understand it.

In other words, the story fictionalizes Anderson’s own anxieties. This is often true with literary short stories. It’s what I like. Unfortunately, I have a terrible time convincing my bookworm friends to read the annual Best American Short Stories. Most bookworms don’t like slice-of-life stories.

Partly, their dislike is with short stories in general. Most bookworms love novels. Writers like Ann Patchett and Elizabeth Strout write slice-of-life stories, but they are longer, and they have a plot. Genre short stories and 19th-century short stories have plots, but contemporary literary fiction short stories seldom do. Unless you’re a connoisseur of literary short stories, enjoying them is difficult.

The real pleasure of reading these kinds of stories is admiring a kind of pseudo-telepathy. In “Take Me to Kirkland,” readers will assume the unnamed narrator is either Anderson or a simulacrum of someone like her. We’re invited into her head. The best literary fiction is when writers reveal their innermost thoughts. Fans of this type of fiction particularly love when writers reveal things so private that we cringe at their honesty.

By the way, this same appeal is why memoirs are bestsellers.

There is a challenge to writing literary fiction. Book, TV, movie, and social media addicts now encounter the inner lives of thousands of people. It’s very difficult to make your thoughts naked in today’s world without appearing mundane. There’s a similarity between literary writers and OnlyFans hosts: you have to be willing to take it all off and show everything.

The narrator in “Take Me to Kirkland” is somewhat over 18, but spends most of the story remembering her friend Chloe from when they were children. At the beginning of the story, they were reunited after being out of touch.

I was surprised that Chloe was calling. We hadn’t spoken in almost two months, for a few reasons. The first was that she had new friends now, the girls she waitressed with three nights a week at the Longhorn Steakhouse. The one Chloe liked the most, Kayla, had a pierced nipple. Chloe showed me a picture after the first time they hung out. I didn’t know that an areola could be that big. I checked Chloe’s face out of the corner of my eye and could tell I was supposed to not make a big deal about it. “Nice,” I said. “Isn’t it so pretty?” she said. “Yeah,” I said. “I like that it’s silver.”

The second reason was that I had been spending more time with Damian, who Chloe said had too much body hair and a weird sense of humor. When I was honest with myself I kind of understood where she was coming from. Damian could be a real piece of shit sometimes and he was four years older than us which, at our current ages, many people found distasteful.

I’m sure this is all mundane to young people today, but for an old baby boomer, this is not how real people or characters talked fifty years ago.

The next part connects the reader to the story’s title. The narrator explains how, as a little kid, she thought Costco’s Kirkland was a magical place. This is a common MFA writing trick. Unfortunately, such childhood fantasies come off as cute rather than psychologically revealing. In fact, some of Anderson’s childhood stories are on the cute side. Especially the one about baby ducks. Such memoryscapes come off as writerly affectations.

Good writing is the accumulation of details. Great writing is the accumulation of significant details. I don’t think these early childhood details were significant. But then we jump forward in time.

Chloe and I met again when we were eleven, in July, when her family moved into the split-level one street over from mine. We had been in different classes every year since second grade and I hadn’t really thought about her. But that summer there she was, sitting on the curb across from our mailbox when I went outside to check if my mom’s Cosmopolitan magazine had been delivered so that I could read it first and then put it back in with the next day’s mail. “No mail on Sundays,” she said from behind me. I had forgotten what day it was.

I couldn’t decide if the girl in front of me, this new Chloe, was hotter than me or not. Her legs were shorter but her tits were bigger, and I had a bad feeling that her face was better than mine. I wanted her to whisper something in my ear. I wanted to cut her hair off. I wanted to watch her suck a slice of lemon and spit the little seeds into my hand one by one.

Chloe considered me too, pausing on my legs. “I live over there now,” she said finally, pointing. “Do you like trampolines?”

“Cool,” I said. “Yeah.”

“Come with me,” she said. Her ass cheeks peeked out from her jean shorts, two pimply little half moons. She took me to the pharmacy down the street to shoplift laxatives, and cough syrup as an afterthought. We passed the bottle back and forth the whole way home and then lay down on the trampoline in her backyard. The trampoline was covered in gravel and twigs and dead leaf fragments, so once we were high we took turns pulling out the pieces that were tangled up in each other’s hair. The syrup left gritty little particles of something on our tongues and made our breath thick and sweet, our thoughts scattering like fistfuls of pennies in a fountain.

These details seem more real and significant. But are they real? This is unknown territory to an old man like me, but is it mundane to someone Anderson’s age? Mundane isn’t always boring. Sometimes, it’s how people connect.

For the next several pages, the story takes a surreal detour for someone like me, but I worry: is this the average world of being a young woman today?

Then we reach the true shocking point of the story, when Chloe disappears. Was she killed or kidnapped? Did she run away? The narrator thinks she sees Chloe in a porn video, one about rough sex and teens. The narrator reveals she watches porn to combat insomnia. This is the narrator getting naked. Are there other things she can tell about herself that are even more disturbing?

To an old person, this is too private. One reason we old folks retreat from the world is that it gets too weird for us. Reading “Take Me to Kirkland” tells me how much the world has changed.

The narrator of this story tells us how she copes.

To try to make myself stop loving Chloe, I sifted through our moments, looking for a handful of them that could bend our narrative arc, or at least end it. The only thing I could come up with was the sight of that ugly black outline on her skin, glistening under the Saran Wrap, and the way she looked when I passed her silently in the hallway at school that last week, bony and distant. But other moments kept creeping in instead, things that made me love her more. Grape breath and her fingers working through my hair, the v of her legs and the o of her mouth when she jumped too high on the trampoline and scared herself, then did it again. The gasp when her hurricane body knocked me flat onto the nylon. “Sorry,” she said, when I pointed at the slick red rug burn on my elbow, and then she licked it.

For the first two weeks after we realized she was gone, people kept asking me if I was ok, and I didn’t really know but I thought I was, except that I was having a very hard time falling asleep. By the end of that first month, more and more I found myself on PornHub, which Damian introduced me to. I would start out watching really basic stuff but as the night wore on, things would escalate and eventually I would find myself watching a gangbang.

Our narrator has finally reached a state of Holden Caulfield-like mental illness. Does she recognize that? Is the world of 2026 that different from 1951 for young people? Or what about Esther Greenwood from The Bell Jar in 1963?

In my nonfiction book club group, we recently asked if fiction or nonfiction was the best way to convey what a moment in time and place is like.

If readers in the 2120s read “Take Me to Kirkland,” will they assume it’s how life was generally like in America in the 2020s? This story resonates with the nonfiction book Girls & Sex: Navigating the Complicated New Landscape by Peggy Orenstein that I read about a decade ago.

The problem with short stories is they are too short. Readers don’t spend the time to think about what they imply. Short stories are going the way of poetry. And if current pundits are correct, the novel will soon follow.

For many readers, reading an anthology like this one is like being pistol-whipped by reality.

JWH