Inside Madeleine

March 17, 2014
This collection of eight short stories and one novella from Brooklyn author Bomer (Nine Months) explores the sexual relationships of American society’s young outcasts, loners, and misfits, and blazes with a frank and raw honesty. In the title novella, Madeleine battles childhood obesity, making her the object of the other kids’ derision and ridicule. She finds few friends and becomes aggressively promiscuous (“slut of all sluts”) in high school before she marries the “nerd” Mark. However, marriage fails to bring her the happiness she craves, and when she becomes pregnant, she has an abortion. Between her spats with Mark, she develops a serious eating disorder, and as her problems escalate, she collapses. In the short story “Outsiders,” Ruthie Waters, a 14-year-old Midwesterner, rooms with Alicia Camp, the only black student at a rich-girls preparatory school, where getting stoned seems to be the main occupation. The bleak “Down the Alley” recounts the savage sexual initiation of seventh-grader Polly from South Bend, Ind. Perhaps the most accomplished of the short stories, “Reading to the Blind Girl,” follows Maggie Drescher at Boston University, as she volunteers to read the anthropology class textbook to “sight-impaired” Caroline (the two don’t exactly hit it off).

April 15, 2014
More gut-wrenching stories about the awkward, hurtful lives of girls from transgressive storyteller Bomer (Nine Months, 2012, etc.). Her new collection is so similar to her last one (Baby, 2010) that it's easy to see where Bomer's stories come from. These are tales that bear bitter fruit, extracting from early adulthood the pains that scars come from. The title story is representative, tracking the sad arc of an obese teen who passes from having sex with strangers at the skating rink through an abortion-riddled marriage before collapsing into anorexia. She could also be the narrator of the first story, "Eye Socket Girls," bemoaning her treatment in a hospital ward: "Sure, the IVs fatten us up for a while, but then we go home," she says. "Then we resume life as we know it. Life is a battle of will. And we're winners." They are so similar, the girls in these nine stories--screwed-up and immature and very real. The stories are set in and around Massachusetts and seem to take place primarily in the heavy metal wasteland of the '80s, where kegs and skunk weed and bad sex proliferate. It's an atmosphere that lends Bomer's female protagonists an interesting reversal--they're just as full of lust and bewilderment and bad choices as the boys they orbit, but their self-awareness lends an ache that escapes many writers in this subgenre. Just when you think it's too nasty, there's a spark that strikes home, like the invisible girl in "Pussies": "Yes, this was before I knew that, when I thought I mattered, when I thought that people saw me, deep into me, saw all my love and excitement at being alive, saw the very glistening, running-overness of my aliveness," she writes. "But we only matter when we do something awful. Then, someone sees us and only then." Bitter little pills about the world through the eyes of disillusioned girls.

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June 1, 2014

This second story collection from Bomer, also author of the novel Nine Months, offers a study of women who make all the wrong choices for all the wrong reasons. Bomer focuses on young women, from small Midwestern towns and big-city suburbs, who struggle for control over their own lives. This struggle often has heartbreaking results, including anorexia, date rape, and alienation. For instance, the narrator of "eye socket girls" says, "You may think that I don't know I'm emaciated. I know every curve and angle of my rib cage." In "outsiders," Ruthie enters prep school with "a suitcase full of wrong clothes and heavy metal albums" and ends up being called white trash despite her efforts to fit in. VERDICT The stories are often brutal, disappointment being the mildest outcome, with Bomer capturing her characters' anger and helplessness in a graphic and gritty style. For readers who enjoy their short fiction explicit and tough.--Joanna Burkhardt, Univ. of Rhode Island Libs., Providence

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