Jenny Zhang’s short story collection Sour Heart is vivid, gross and hilarious – and ‘The Empty the Empty the Empty’ is no exception. It follows a nine-year-old girl, Lucy, whose youthful enthusiasm is played for laughs: “I lived, breathed, and exuded mind-boggling, head-spinning, neck-craning, heart-pounding, ravishing beauty. I was the best looking girl in fourth grade.” Yet as the story unfolds, we learn that Lucy is capable of acts of cruelty against the other girls in her life – both intentional and unintentional. The story ramps up to its horrifying climax, and the gap between Lucy’s understanding of the increasingly adult world around her and its consequences widens to a point of no return.
First published in Diagram, and available to read online here; collected in Sour Heart, Bloomsbury, 2017
A Personal Anthology 