Wendy writes in the intro to the Brick Lane / Desperate Lits Prize Anthology 22 Fictions that you can get away with formal experiment of a wild kind in short fiction, because word-count constriction means novelty isn’t exhaustible in the same way as in a novel. What that means, though, is that the formal experiment has to be both highwire and agile, in order to be expansive rather than gimmicky. May-Lan fits a whole pair of lives into this screenplay-format story. Three friends and I had a short-story reading group going for a while. This was our favourite one.
First published in Things to Make and Break, CB Editions, 2014. Now also published by Sceptre
A Personal Anthology 