A Manual for How to Love Us: Stories

by Erin Slaughter Narrated by Erin deWard

Overview

A debut, interlinked collection of stories exploring the primal nature of women's grief-offering insight into the profound experience of loss and the absurd ways in which we seek control in an unruly world.

Seamlessly shifting between the speculative and the blindingly real, balancing the bizarre with the subtle brutality of the mundane, A Manual for How to Love Us is a tender portrait of women trying their best to survive, love, and find genuine meaning in the aftermath of loss.

In these unconventional and unpredictably connected stories, Erin Slaughter shatters the stereotype of the soft-spoken, sorrowful woman in distress, queering the domestic and honoring the feral in all of us. In each story, grieving women embrace their wildest impulses as they attempt to master their lives: one woman becomes a “gazer” at a fraternity house, another slowly moves into her otherworldly stained-glass art, a couple speaks only in their basement's black box, and a thruple must decide what to do when one partner disappears.

The women in Erin Slaughter's stories suffer messy breaks, whisper secrets to the ghosts tangled in the knots of their hair, eat raw meat to commune with their inner wolves, and build deadly MLM schemes along the Gulf Coast.

Set across oft-overlooked towns in the American South, A Manual for How to Love Us spotlights women who are living on the brink and clinging to its precipitous edge. Lyrical and surprisingly humorous, A Manual for How to Love Us is an exciting debut that reveals the sticky complications of living in a body, in all its grotesquerie and glory.

Editorial Reviews

APRIL 2023 - AudioFile

Erin deWard narrates these haunting stories about grieving women with quiet intensity. In one story, a girl perceives herself to be a wolf and grieves that her best friend no longer believes in their wildness in the same way she does. In another, a woman tries to compartmentalize the devastating loss of a stillborn child by thinking about it only while sitting in a box in her basement. DeWard is especially good at voicing characters of varying ages, capturing the intensity of preteen girls alongside the weariness of middle-aged mothers. She also excels in scenes of emotional distress and confusion; in several of the stories' climaxes, her voice takes on a frenetic energy. This is a quiet but assured debut collection. L.S. © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine

Publishers Weekly

01/09/2023

Poet Slaughter’s gritty debut fiction collection (after The Sorrow Festival) follows protagonists grappling with longing and loss. In “Anywhere,” narrator Andrea reunites with her friend Zell after five years apart and accepts Zell’s invitation to go on a road trip. The trip’s parameters are vague at the outset; Andrea, who’s long been in love with Zell, is excited for the chance to “run away” with her, and Andrea wonders if Zell is trying to evade someone. Not only is the trip lacking in fun, though, it ends in gunfire. “You Too Can Cure Your Life” follows Melody, who peddles a dubious and possibly harmful medicine called Life Cure online and meets a woman from Guatemala who’s been taking Life Cure, and whose partner left her after her cancer diagnosis. In “Nest,” two sisters cope with the recent death of their father. The 16-year-old narrator dates an older guy, while her younger sister, Kate, doesn’t eat. Meanwhile, the narrator thinks their father’s ghost has taken up residence in her hair, but doesn’t tell Kate. Taken as a whole, the amount of suffering faced by the characters makes the book feel one-note, though there are plenty of inviting lyrical descriptions (here’s Andrea from “Anywhere,” recounting the trip: “Miles and miles of night, the darkness like a fleece blanket”). Those who can power through the pervading gloom will appreciate Slaughter’s storytelling chops. (Mar.)

From the Publisher

Slaughter admirably conveys a heightened awareness of how we harbor within our tamed lives an undeniable wildness.”— — Library Journal

“[A] gritty debut fiction collection…[readers] will appreciate Slaughter’s storytelling chops.”— — Publishers Weekly

"A Manual for How to Love Us is a collection that reads like a wolf howl, every page alive with longing and hunger and desire and rage. Erin Slaughter writes with tenderness—capturing the sweet intimacies of friendship, of kindness in unexpected places—but also with an unflinching eye for the pain that connects us, shapes us, makes us who we are. This is prose from a poet’s heart." — Allegra Hyde, author of Eleutheria

"This deeply imagined, brilliantly ferocious debut collection sits perfectly among the fiction of Danielle Lazarin and Kelly Link. A Manual for How to Love Us lays bare the power and wildness of grief. It is unequivocally one of the best debut collections I’ve read in years."  — Peter Kispert, author of I Know You Know Who I Am

“The stories in A Manual for How to Love Us read like a cold ocean swim: salty and refreshing and sincere, each a bracing exploration of the particular blessings and burdens of womanhood in all its ugliness and glory. I couldn’t ask for something stranger or more beautiful. Erin Slaughter is a masterful sentence writer in firm command of her craft, and this book is an inspiration and a gift.” — Julia Fine, author of The Upstairs House and What Should Be Wild

“Erin Slaughter’s debut collection, A Manual for How to Love Us, is an evocative mix of strange realism and Bachelardian obsession. Slaughter is a gifted stylist who can instill the most mundane objects with profound meaning and depth. In her world, a tongue is never only a tongue, a thorn far more than a thorn, and even a fly–buzzing alone in a bedroom–harbors the impact of a father.” — Isle McElroy, author of The Atmospherians and People Collide

“Stunningly fierce … Slaughter intentionally blurs the line between real and unreal and ghosts and people, creating a spellbinding tilt across stories and worlds. This dark but whimsical collection is perfect for fans of magical realism and strong female characters." — Booklist

"With a poet’s lyricism, Erin Slaughter crafts a debut collection that is speculative, dark, and thoroughly feral." — Electric Literature

Library Journal

01/01/2023

DEBUT Following two poetry collections (including The Sorrow Festival), Slaughter offers a story collection that invites us to enter into strange and liminal spaces holding the simple, tense truth that to be human is an act of social acquiescence that contains a latent feral element within us all. Each voice is decidedly female, with the various incarnations revealing the inherent dangers, vulnerabilities, and strengths of living in a female body; the stories themselves refuse to judge actions society labels as risky, foolhardy, or wanton. These women heedlessly run away into the unknown, with girls living in carefully self-constructed worlds in order to survive, and wives and mothers navigating the treacherousness of everyday life—all beautifully realized examples of the shameless complexity of living. In addition to the delightfully tangled worlds Slaughter so compellingly creates, there is an added enjoyment in her elastic use of form. In the story "The Box," large sections of the narrative are black, evoking a mute voice for an inanimate character, while a clever use of footnotes allows readers entry into internal thoughts. The title story uses short, prose poem—like fragments that read like some ancient artifact of folk-telling that never rings anachronistic. VERDICT Slaughter admirably conveys a heightened awareness of how we harbor within our tamed lives an undeniable wildness.—Laura Florence

APRIL 2023 - AudioFile

Erin deWard narrates these haunting stories about grieving women with quiet intensity. In one story, a girl perceives herself to be a wolf and grieves that her best friend no longer believes in their wildness in the same way she does. In another, a woman tries to compartmentalize the devastating loss of a stillborn child by thinking about it only while sitting in a box in her basement. DeWard is especially good at voicing characters of varying ages, capturing the intensity of preteen girls alongside the weariness of middle-aged mothers. She also excels in scenes of emotional distress and confusion; in several of the stories' climaxes, her voice takes on a frenetic energy. This is a quiet but assured debut collection. L.S. © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine

Product Details

BN ID:	2940175913607
Publisher:	HarperCollins Publishers
Publication date:	03/14/2023
Edition description:	Unabridged
Sales rank:	1,049,511

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