“Jenna, you better start loving God now, cause the years are passing, and when I screw you, I can see there are little hairs in your ass that weren’t there before, so I’m just telling you that you better find him soon.”
At her best, Heti is simultaneously deft playful and slight, and profound tragic and weighty. Sometimes her stories get a bit cute for me, but this one hits the note perfectly. Consisting of a man exhorting his girlfriend to stop sending emails to other men and to start loving God instead, it’s both funny and humiliatingly human. Is it cynical? Certainly it’s cruel, in the way only impeccably observed truthfulness can be. The speaker is so misguided that he’s almost endearing. At the centre of it there’s an interminable anxiety, and a stupid, stubborn, ridiculous refusal to believe that nothing’s ever going to calm it. And what is the speaker supposed to do with that? Heti doesn’t presume to know – only, not this.
Published in Mal Journal, 2019. Read online here
A Personal Anthology 