‘Abortion, a Love Story’ by Nicole Flattery

The text of ‘Abortion, a Love Story’ “went to press before the end of rehearsals and so may differ slightly from the play performed”. Flattery’s story thus begins, and remains, open to interpretation; unlike most shows that require audience participation, however, this story actually works. It’s funny, vulnerable, brilliant, and it contains one of the most memorable lines in literature, delivered by a girl called Lucy to a packed audience during “showtime”: “See my problem with all of you, and that has always been my problem, is that I just don’t like any of you very much and I never have, you bunch of pricks.” I can’t remember whether I’d started doing theatre in Cambridge when I read this sentence, one lunchtime in Newnham Hall, but I do remember reaching for a pen and writing it down, in the middle of a light blue sheet of paper, and placing it on the front of my notes binder, like a mantra or a charm; it’s still there.

First published in Show Them a Good Time, The Singing Fly 2019

‘Love & Friendship’ by Jane Austen

Recently, for the 250 anniversary of Jane Austen’s birth, a group of Newnham undergraduates organised a day of celebrations in the Old Labs in Newnham. We had tea and talks, cake and country dance, and we read ‘Love & Freindship’aloud together, as God and Austen had intended. The greatness of this short novella is that, along with many of Austen’s ‘Juvenilia’, it feels like a satire of her more mature and well-loved works. Laura’s description of her depth of feeling anticipates and rivals Marianne Dashwood’s “A sensibility too tremblingly alive to every affliction of my friends, my acquaintance, and particularly to every affliction of my own, was my fault, if a fault it could be called.” The romance is there, along with the scathing study of recklessness, wickedness, greed, but it’s all — eye-wateringly — funnier.

First published in Juvenilia, Chatto and Windus, 1922

‘Blood Rites’ by Daisy Johnson

Some would say ‘Blood Rites’ is about cannibalism; I would say it’s about female friendship. Vowing to never let their food ruin their lives again, three young women move from Paris into an old house on the edge of the fen, where they start picking men from the local pub in order to eat them. This might strike you as somewhat morally questionable, except the narrator’s first person plural has already taken you into the mentality of the group: “When we were younger we learnt men the way other people learnt languages or the violin.” The house where I lived in Newnham, with fifteen other women and the ghost of Sylvia Plath, was also old and on the edge of the fen. Like the house in ‘Blood Rites’, “it was a stupendous house, a house that knew how to feel.”

Published in Fen, Jonathan Cape, 2016

‘The Old House at Home’ by Jeanette Winterson

All the stories in ‘Night Side of the River’ toe the line between technology and the occult, virtual reality and paranormal activities, to question the reader’s perception of the world we bewilderingly live in. ‘The Old House at Home’, an atmospheric ghost story set in New York, collapses these apparently distinct planes of existence, as it collapses timelines, and ‘the living and the Dead. That old binary.’ There were rumours of Sylvia Plath’s ghost haunting Whitstead, of course; in my last year living in the house, someone’s girlfriend said she felt a cold presence in the third floor bathroom. But we talked of “Sylvia”, or “Sylvia’s ghost”, as the benignant genius of the place, our household god. Reading her description of the house in her journal, in her letters, made us more aware of its history, that the lives of countless others had unfolded there, that they would continue to do so after we were gone. Like the house in Winterson’s story, Whistead was (is) “a Miss Havisham house pinned in its own past.”

First published in Jeanette Winterson’s Substack, Mind Over Matter, on 18 November 2021 and available to read here. Collected in Night Side of the River, Jonathan Cape, 2023

‘Kitchen’ by Banana Yoshimoto

“The place I like best in the world is the kitchen.” After sharing a kitchen with fifteen other girls (plus Sylvia Plath), it’s nothing short of a miracle that I feel the same. But Yoshimoto’s story captures everything that is magical about sharing a kitchen, no matter how messy, dirty, crowded. It follows Mikage Sakurai in and out of lonely spots, as she finds companionship in cooking, warmth in the glow of a refrigerator. People and places, however fleeting in Mikage’s life, are sharply defined in Yoshimoto’s luminous prose:

“The kitchen window. The smiling faces of friends, the fresh greenery of the university campus a backdrop to Sotaro’s profile, my grandmother’s voice on the phone when I called her late at night … All of it. Everything that was no longer there.”

First published in Kitchen, Faber, 1997

‘The world with love’ by Ali Smith

In ‘The world with love’, a woman bumps into an old schoolmate and her three children, fifteen years after school is over. Smith’s “you” shows little nostalgia for the days of old (just as well: beware of adults who miss high school, or university … ), but the old schoolmate “reminds you so much of the girl you knew that your head fills with the time she smashed someone’s guitar by throwing it out of the art room window”. Then, she says something that brings back a flood of memories, of French class, of a dark-haired girl, of words that “flashed through your head in other tongues, their undersides glinting like quicksilver”. I first read ‘The world with love’ in the common room in Whitstead, a place that doesn’t exist anymore, since the house was renovated. Smith’s story knows that the past is always a place you can’t go back to.

First published in Free Love, Virago, 1995

‘Nobody’s Empire’ by Belle and Sebastian

Many songs are short stories in disguise; ‘Nobody’s Empire’, by Belle and Sebastian, is one of them. You can just see the “I” of the first line, remembering the “girl that sung like the chime of a bell”. The narrative arch of their story stretches in mysterious directions, as its narrator remembers the future, and the girl (now a mother of two) “marching with the crowd, singing dirty and loud”. It reminds me of my room in Whitstead, the window open onto the garden, on the edge of Newnham grounds; the safest place to dream from. The lyrics unfold against the bright texture of the music, radiant as a moment that’s just about to become memory: “If I had a camera I’d snap you now/ Cause there’s beauty in every stumble”.

In the album Girls in Peacetime Want to Dance, Matador, 2015

Introduction

I hope you will enjoy this mix of stories, which I have selected and ordered as though it were a published anthology. Consideration has been given to variety, balance, and pacing. There are some recurring themes, settings, and questions within the collection. None of the stories has previously appeared on A Personal Anthology; some of the writers have. They include well-established contemporary authors, fresh emerging talent, and pillars of the literary canon.

Sitting comfortably, the reader begins, by turning to the first story.

‘Ernestine and Kit’ by Kevin Barry

We will begin and end this collection with fictional women who are in late middle age, like me. Ernestine and Kit are “in their sixties”, respectable and judgemental, with wittily well-observed dialogue.

“The skirt’s barely down past her modesty, are you watching?”

They are taking a drive on a summer’s day through County Sligo in Ireland, visiting some tourist attractions.

“As the engine cut the car filled with the sound of anxious birds and the nearby chatter of the castle visitors. For a moment, the ladies pleasantly listened – they did love a summer-afternoon crowd.”

But the reason why they love a crowd is not what the reader might expect. What opens as a light read with a little social commentary, soon takes a turn which makes it much funnier and much darker. ‘Ernestine and Kit’ greatly rewards a reread, when phrases which might have seemed ordinary will take on more meaning.

Researching for this anthology, I discovered that there is a ten-minute film of ‘Ernestine and Kit’ directed by Simon Bird, starring Pauline Collins. Unfortunately I couldn’t find it available to watch anywhere, but I have high hopes for it when I do.

First published in Columbia Journal Issue No. 49, 2011. Collected in Dark Lies The Island, Jonathan Cape, 2012

‘Turnstones’ by Carol Farrelly

Carol and I were both Jerwood/Arvon fiction mentees in 2015, mentored by Ross Raisin (of whom more later). Carol’s settings and situations become solid through a few, perfect details. Within them she explores relatable characters’ complex emotions and psychologies.

In ‘Turnstones’ the protagonist is Jo, a student whose immediate problem is that she has forgotten her pass card for the library. While she is arguing her case with the security guard, the narrative takes us gently through her background, revealing her insecurities about being too working class to belong in this prestigious university.

“A finger of rain fell on the flagstones. A mottled brown bird darted past her and ducked beneath the turnstile, then hopped, all twiggy orange feet, onto the staircase. A turnstone, she thought. She smiled at its quicksilver audacity. Not one flap or stumble or glance over the shoulder. No notion of trespass. It trotted inside as though the library was its usual, wintering home.”

That turnstone is followed by others breaking in and causing chaos until Jo is presented with an understated epiphany.

“They moved like one stretched beating muscle, an echocardiogram that was strong and healthy and still had far to go.”

First published at Granta online, here, 2nd June 2021, and anthologised in I Cleaned The- and Other Stories, Paper & Ink, 2021, both as a result of winning the Canada and Europe Region of the 2021 Commonwealth Prize

‘Dreams’ by Anton Chekhov

“Before them lie ten yards of dark-brown, muddy road, behind them lies as much; beyond that, wherever they turn, rises a dense wall of white fog. They walk and walk, but the ground they walk on is always the same; the wall comes no nearer; the spot remains a spot.”

This road is the location for the whole of ‘Dreams’. Two soldiers are escorting a vagrant with amnesia. In some ways, this is a scene of the grittiest naturalism, yet the weather and the past-less man give it a tint of the supernatural. The three working class men discuss their ambitions. They unearth the homeless man’s roots. But, in the end, after all their efforts to fill the future with particulars, it remains as blank as the fog.

I wish I hadn’t waited until I was in my fifties to read Chekhov. But I am glad that there are lots of stories by him which I have yet to read.

First published as Мечты in New Times No. 3849, November 15 1886. First collected in In the Dusk, 1887, St Petersburg. I read it in Selected Stories, translator unknown*, Introduction and Notes by Joe Andrew, Wordsworth Classics, 1996. It is available to read free online in a different translation here

* Wordsworth Classics publishers say on their site: “A note on the translation: our edition was first published in 1996 and no details of the translator were included. We have made a concerted effort to identify the source of the translation, but without success. The stories seem to have a continuity of style which suggests they are all the work of the same translator. Should anyone be able to cast any light on this, do please let us know.”

‘Dancing in the Grass’ by Alice Fowler

From nineteenth century mud and fog, we move to vistas on chalk grasslands, where orchids are growing wild in June 2018. Alice Fowler writes outwardly tidy stories, in which tangled darkness hides beneath apparently comfortable domesticity. ‘Dancing in the Grass’ begins with the narrator and her cleaner, Agata, meeting by chance. “Then, together, we stepped on to the down: the great expanse of waving grassland, sweet-scented, opening before us; so we became explorers, poised upon its edge.”

The first sentence of ‘Dancing In The Grass’ is about climate change and the narrator is concerned with nature conservation, but also with not appearing racist. Dead flowers are weighed against living humans.

“‘This is England. Wildflowers are protected here.’

My voice flared louder than I wished. The outcome of the vote was known by then. England – Britain – weren’t words that I said easily. Agata was applying for residency, she’d said”.

The sympathies of the reader keep shifting, as do the relative statuses of the two women, certainties about morality, and the narrator’s sense of who she is. Both women behave badly and claim victimhood, both develop and change over the course of the story. The ending is great.

Collected in The Truth Has Arms and Legs, Fly on the Wall Press, 2023

‘The Cart’ by Mariana Enriquez, trans. Megan McDowell

‘The Cart’ is an evocative morality tale, which also illustrates the way many people currently live only a touch of bad luck away from absolute poverty. Like many of the stories in this Personal Anthology, it balances absolute, highly detailed reality with an element which is a bit weird.

Two drunks get into a fight in a working-class Argentinian suburb. The outsider is humiliated then forced to abandon his shopping cart full of “bottles, cardboard, and phone books.” A couple of weeks later, bad things start happening in that street. People get ill, are arrested, disappear. The local drunk claims this means the shopping cart is cursed.

“After two months no one in the neighbourhood had a phone anymore – they couldn’t afford it. After three months, they had to tap the electricity wires because they couldn’t pay their bills.”

Enriquez builds a community of interesting people through cumulative specifics, then goes on to destroy almost every one of them in individual, contemporary ways. Only one household is secretly safe. The subtlety of the writing is such that it is never made clear whether there is a supernatural factor, or just a coincidence of ill fortunes.

“The taxi driver ventured on foot to the other side of the avenue. There, he said, everything was fine as could be.”

Collected in Los Peligros de Fumar en la Cama, Editorial Anagrama, 2017. First published in English in The Dangers of Smoking in Bed, Granta Books, 2022

‘The Fishing-boat Picture’ by Alan Sillitoe

Growing up in the South of England, Sillitoe’s Saturday Night, Sunday Morning and The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner shaped my views of English life further north. ‘The Fishing-boat Picture’ is more sentimental than my usual taste, with a sweet, pure sadness runs through it, but we have reached a point in this anthology where the reader might like a break from dark, cynical stories. It describes one ordinary life within huge historical events, one of my favourite things.

“[M]aybe they were the best times we ever had together in our lives. They certainly helped us through the long monotonous dead evenings of the war.”

The narrator is a postman, Harry, who is conscious of narrating: “If I started using long and complicated words that I’d searched for in the dictionary I’d use them too many times […] so I’d rather not make what I’m going to write look foolish by using dictionary words.” He recalls the previous twenty-eight years (from the 1920s to the 1950s), in which he married Kathy, she left him, she came back to visit years later, in a sorry state, and eventually she died.

“I looked up and caught her staring at the picture of a fishing boat on the wall: brown and rusty with sails half spread in a bleak sunrise, not far from the beach along which a woman walked bearing a basket of fish on her shoulder.”

This picture passed between Harry and Kathy over the years, a symbol of their relationship in a clear but never overstated way. They remained always fond of each other, but Harry was too unadventurous, Kathy too reckless, and neither managed to learn balance from the other.

Collected in The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner, WH Allen & Co, 1959. A video of a reading by Garry Cooper is available here