Miranda July is the queen of unreliable narrations, and this is one of my favourites. A young woman lies awake in bed listening to the creak of footsteps in the dead hours of the night, convinced that she and her slumbering boyfriend are about to be murdered by a stranger: “He had all the time in the world for this, my god did he have time. I have never taken such care with anything.”
While she waits to meet her death, the narrator chews over various failings and disappointments in her life: her boyfriend (whom she stalked obsessively for years); her inadequately interesting friends; her own many shortcomings. What powers the story is the self-aware, neurotically comic voice. You could argue that because of the subtext, the writer is ‘showing’ as much as ‘telling’. Perhaps good telling always manages to do both.
First published on Fence.com and available to read here. Collected in No One Belongs Here More than You, Canongate, 2007
A Personal Anthology 