This debut collection contains many examples of what a writer can do when she’s not afraid to play around with telling. ‘Infinite Husbands’ is one of my favourites:
“My second husband is hilarious and cruel and devastatingly handsome, with watery blue eyes. He is so handsome that I can’t even think about him for too long as my heart rate rises unbearably, and I have to lie down. He has been missing for quite some time.”
The show-don’t-tell police would be all over this with a red pen: Don’t tell us that he’s ‘hilarious’, ‘cruel’, ‘handsome’! Dramatize these qualities! Show us how he behaves towards the narrator so that we can draw our own conclusions. Use unusual verbs! But that would take all day, and it’s not what the story is interested in.
Many of the narrators in this collection are – as the title suggests – not entirely trustworthy.
First published in The London Magazine and available to read here. Collected in The Unreliable Nature Writer, Scratch Books, 2024
A Personal Anthology 