Why I Don't Write

June 1, 2020
Minot's first collection since 1989 begins with a story ironically titled "Why I Don't Write." This doesn't seem to apply to Minot herself, who has written six books since 1986, but it does suggest the psychic toll of being a writer in an age of Twitter-size attention spans and yawning cynicism. "What do you do all day?" someone asks the narrator. The answer, both to this question and the one posed by the title, comes in the form of a disorienting collage of allusions to private heartaches, post-2016 political scandals, national tragedies, domestic chores, and pointed observations. ("Women writers without children: many. Women writers with children: few.") The nine stories that follow are a mixed bag. The most successful show why sustained engagement matters, especially for a writer like Minot whose gift is for illuminating revelatory moments in characters' lives rather than experimental fiction. Sometimes these moments are tragic, as in "Boston Common at Twilight," which explores a teenager's ill-fated decision to follow a stranger, a woman, into the city to buy pot from her and, later, the heartbreaking consequence of his failure to stop blaming himself. Elsewhere, the stories turn on happy, though somewhat old-fashioned, epiphanies. In "Polepole," a woman's brief encounter with the maid of a married man with whom she's just had a one-night stand in Kenya makes her determined to take better care of herself. Throughout, Minot is keenly aware of how men hurt women--as well as how women sabotage themselves. In "The Language of Cats and Dogs," another standout, the protagonist recalls the moment her writing professor propositioned her. Rather than tell him off, she sits frozen in his disgusting car, embarrassed by his cheesy pickup line and ashamed as though she's somehow to blame. This collection's best stories show us why Minot should resist irony and never stop writing beautifully about women's lives.

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June 22, 2020
Minot (Thirty Girls) finds hints of violence, grief, and trauma in her characters’ interior lives in this precise, shimmering collection. In “Polepole,” American journalist Daisy regrets an affair with a married Englishman stationed in Kenya, where he slaps a boy across the face for vandalizing his Jeep. “Occupied” follows a woman walking past an Occupy Wall Street encampment in Lower Manhattan while remembering the attacks on 9/11 and reflecting on the breakup with the father of her eight-year-old son (“the place where he’d been was a ripped hole”). While the analogy to the World Trade Center’s “perpetual crater of construction” initially feels unbalanced, Minot brilliantly subverts Ivy’s self-absorption and gives her a rude awakening. Amid the conventional narratives are shorter, fragmentary stories. Of these, only the title story stands out, in which a constant, distracting stream of information passes through the narrator’s consciousness (“Your system must be overloaded. Or you have a virus”; “Fifty-three dead not including the shooter”). In “The Language of Cats and Dogs,” the collection’s strongest entry, a woman looks back on her professor’s sexual advances 40 years earlier in Boston, when she was 20, observing how the resulting fear and shame would forever alter her encounters with men. Minot’s sly, layered approach marks an impressive reimagining of 1980s minimalism. Agent: Georges Borchardt, Georges Borchardt, Inc.

August 1, 2020
Minot, the author of five sterling novels, including Thirty Girls (2014), presents her first short story collection in three decades. The opening two out of 10 pristine stories resemble poetry in their short lines, plays in their stacked dialogue, texts and tweets in their bursts, each a jolt. The rest are fully formed, often erotic, gorgeous, and searing. Minot is a shock-to-the-system storyteller focused on the predator-prey dynamic in unsought or violent sexual encounters. A woman's preoccupation with an indifferent lover puts her at risk when she visits the Occupy Wall Street protest site. Documentarian Daisy falls into an unnerving situation in Kenya with a married journalist. A teenage boy's naive attempt to buy pot on the street leads to shocking violence, while a student's relationship with a teacher highlights the fact that women are always in danger alone with men. Caf� Mort is a surprising, surreal, eerie, yet funny take on grief. Minot is exceptionally attuned to forces intimate and social, and her gift for potent distillation yields stories that are stunning in every sense of the word.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)

Starred review from September 1, 2020

In her first collection since 1989's Lust & Other Stories, the award-winning Minot (Thirty Girls) depicts characters balancing on a knife's edge, often unable to move forward. Two lovers bicker unresolvedly (and rather drolly) as they head to a wedding, the title story's writer stews about a long list of ideas she can't develop, and several stories feature women who acknowledge that they need to be more forceful. Swept up in an inappropriate affair, an American documentarian in Africa realizes that she'd missed the point where she should have stepped back, while an artist who has ridden her bicycle to Occupy Wall Street in search of a former lover--a world-famous photographer to whom she rather lamely submitted--has an accident afterward and ends up in an ambulance, "[moving] from one version of surrender to another." VERDICT Crisp, observant stories about our inactions as well as our actions; highly recommended. [See Prepub Alert, 2/4/20.]

Copyright 2020 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

March 1, 2020

An award-winning author, most recently of Thirty Girls, a New York Times Notable Book and Economist Best Book, Minot hasn't published a story collection since 1989's Lust & Other Stories. This collection features characters slipping and sliding in a difficult world, from the writer carefully cataloging why she can't write to two young lovers who can't part and can't not fight to an artist steering his bicycle through a throng of protesters as he contemplates a difficult lover.

Copyright 2020 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.