I think about this story all the damn time. It is really the second part of a story, in that it is best to read ‘The Story of’ from the same collection first—but, then, you really have to as it is the story that opens this collection and ‘The Story of Of’ is the one that closes it. The stories both deal with a character named Norma, but where the first is a story that functions as a closed ecosystem, the latter is a story that continues to move and branch and shift in thrillingly meta-textual ways. As the Normas of this story become aware of their existence inside of a story, the text is indented farther and farther across the page, a great example of a writer pushing against the boundaries of what can happen on a page and the possibility of what might happen if you could jump off of it.
First published in The Dark Dark, FSG Originals, 2017
A Personal Anthology 