Sleeping Alone: Stories

by Ru Freeman

Overview

In this collection of rich and textured stories about crossing borders, both real and imagined, Sleeping Alone asks one of the fundamental questions of our times: What is the toll of feeling foreign in one’s land, to others, or even to oneself? A cast of misfits, young and old, single and coupled, even entire family units, confront startling changes wrought by difficult circumstances or harrowing choices.

These stories span the world, moving from Maine to Sri Lanka, from Dublin to Philadelphia, paying exquisite attention to the dance between the intimate details of our lives and our public selves.

Whether Ru Freeman, author of the novel On Sal Mal Lane, is capturing secrets kept by siblings in Sri Lanka, or the life of itinerants in New York City, she renders the nuances of her characters’ lives with real sensitivity, and imbues them with surprising dignity and grace.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781644450888
Publisher:	Graywolf Press
Publication date:	06/07/2022
Pages:	240
Sales rank:	1,115,454
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.20(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Ru Freeman is the author of A Disobedient Girl and On Sal Mal Lane, and the editor of Extraordinary Rendition: American Writers on Palestine and Indivisible: Global Leaders on Shared Security. She directs the Artist Network at Narrative 4.

Editorial Reviews

★ 04/25/2022

In Freeman’s delicate and vital debut collection (after the novel On Sal Mal Lane), characters examine their convictions and transform via relationships with others. In “Fault Lines,” Mira, a Black mother from a Philadelphia suburb is presumed by her neighbors to be a nanny because her skin color is darker than her daughter’s. In “The Wake,” a girl named Silvia grows up in a New York City “mousehole” apartment, where she watches her mother, Rene, grieve over the death of a cult leader, her newly found spiritual practice “a riddle” that Sylvia “determine to solve.” Don, a Sri Lankan cheese-making apprentice who lodges in 1969 Dublin with a woman named Madailein and her daughters in “The Irish Girl,” learns about the city through Madailein, whose voice is equally admonishing and loving, and punctuated by a “nicotine-and-chocolate laugh.” The story spans 33 years, and by its end, Don and Madailein “have grown toward each other.” Freeman’s charisma shines on each page of these beautiful stories. This is a treasure. Agent: Nicole Cunningham, Book Group. (June)

Publishers Weekly

Freeman is not afraid to linger in disquiet. The eleven individual stories tell of many kinds of heartache, more than it would seem a slim volume could hold. . . [She] makes visible lives that are often hidden in plain sight.” —Carol Iaciofano Aucoin, WBUR Arts & Culture

“Searing. . . . While Freeman’s prose has many virtues—she’s masterful on a line level and utilizes effective narrative techniques in each story—it’s her ability to highlight how lonely it is to not truly be seen that makes Sleeping Alone so remarkable.”—Rachel León, Chicago Review of Books

“Delicate and vital. . . . Freeman’s charisma shines on each page of these beautiful stories. This is a treasure.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review

“[Sleeping Alone] methodically strips away the intricate layers of privilege, revealing the sometimes-sinister truth that no one is ever truly safe, regardless of societal status. . . . Each story is tightly structured and aimed to pierce through the reader’s own sense of stability. . . . Deceptively disturbing, deeply felt, and original.”—Kirkus Reviews

“Set around the world and grappling with themes of race and class, Freeman's stories work precisely because they are full of the drama and the ordinariness of life. Here is proof that there is tragedy and beauty in the everyday; you just have to know where to look.”—Poornima Apte, Booklist, starred review

“Sleeping Alone presents us with a deftly rendered cross-section of contemporary society.”—Megan V. Luebberman, Zyzzyva

“A collection of marvels. Every story of Sleeping Alone feels vivid and intimate, boldly mining the complicated intersections between the global and the local in exquisite prose. Freeman is a writer of remarkable talent and ferocity, and it’s breathtaking to see her working at the height of her powers.”—Tania James, author of The Tusk That Did the Damage

These deftly controlled stories almost prickle the skin with their secrets, with the shame and longing and injustice, both personal and structural, that is revealed. But they also contain an exhilarating beauty, what feels like the charged breath of life. Sleeping Alone is a collection that left me awestruck and also immediately wanting to go back and reread it for the depths I knew I had barely begun to find within its pages. Ru Freeman is an author of rare genius.”—Mary South, author of You Will Never Be Forgotten

“Stand in the doorway of these beautiful stories and admire for a moment the architecture of how they have invited you in. Then step fully inside into a textured world of borders breached, lands left behind, new territories discovered, families remembered, and vistas uncovered. These stories cross and criss-cross the world, making it tiny and epic at the same time. Dublin, Philadelphia, Maine, Sri Lanka, New York, they are all here, and we, as readers, are all there. Ru Freeman captures the moment when the thorn enters the skin, and then she leads us forward towards healing. A great collection from one of the best and most necessary voices of our times.”—Colum McCann, author of Apeirogon

From the Publisher

2022-03-16
This short story collection methodically strips away the intricate layers of privilege, revealing the sometimes-sinister truth that no one is ever truly safe, regardless of societal status.

With a cast of richly diverse characters, from immigrants to housewives and domestic workers, Freeman reveals the interpersonal dance of those who orbit around, or are beholden to, the middle class. “Retaining Walls” is about a contractor who transforms the homes of people with money while navigating a too-familiar intimacy from his clients and his conditioned emotional distance from his own family. In “Fault Lines,” featuring three women whose lives intertwine, class tensions trump all: Mira, who is brown with White-presenting children, grapples with being otherized as she’s assumed to be the nanny by a White woman, a fellow parent at their children’s suburban school; Mira’s nanny, Gabriella, wants to go back to school but is held back by her social circumstances, while Mira compounds Gabriella’s situation with her passive-aggressive demands; and Iris, another domestic worker who is friends with Gabby, fights for sick days to attend her own children. In the book’s most unsettling story, “Sleeping Alone,” Sameera, a Middle Eastern immigrant, metes out a private insurgency on her romantic partner, a White professor of Middle Eastern studies, as well as his friends and colleagues in central Maine through a series of small, nonlethal, but devastating deeds to punish them for their unconscious biases about not only her country and people, but their refusal to truly see her. Each story is tightly structured and aimed to pierce through the reader’s own sense of stability, which, while not always enjoyable, is certainly effective.

Deceptively disturbing, deeply felt, and original, this collection will work its way beneath your nerves like a splinter.

Kirkus Reviews