Why I Don't Write: And Other Stories

by Susan Minot Narrated by Alex McKenna, Kristen Sieh, Andrew Eiden

Overview

A superb collection of short fiction--her first in thirty years and spanning many geographies--from the critically acclaimed author of Monkeys, Evening, and Thirty Girls. A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK.

A writer dryly catalogs the myriad reasons she cannot write; an artist bicycles through a protest encampment in lower Manhattan and ruminates on an elusive lover; an old woman on her deathbed calls out for a man other than her husband; a hapless fifteen-year-old boy finds himself in sexual peril; two young people in the 1990s fall helplessly in love, then bicker just as helplessly, tortured by jealousy and mistrust. In each of these stories Minot explores the difficult geometry of human relations, the lure of love and physical desire, and the lifelong quest for meaning and connection. Her characters are all searching for truth, in feeling and in action, as societal norms are upended and justice and coherence flounder. Urgent and immediate, precisely observed, deeply felt, and gorgeously written, the stories in Why I Don't Write showcase an author at the top of her form.

Editorial Reviews

SEPTEMBER 2020 - AudioFile

The performances by multiple narrators of Minot's collection of short stories create a collective world of fascinating life moments, and one afterlife. Minot's audiobook is filled with compelling human detail. The results are moving and occasionally shocking. Finding the perfect tone of sadness, Andrew Eiden narrates a gently heartbreaking story of a dying woman calling out to another man in the presence of her husband. Kristen Sieh conveys the startling kindness of a barista serving customers at a café for the deceased. Alex McKenna's performance navigates the emotional complexity of a young college student who absorbs the impact of a male professor propositioning her. All the performances exude a kind of detached observation while maintaining an insightful intimacy. S.P.C. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2020, Portland, Maine

The New York Times Book Review - Justin Taylor S.M.

…Why I Don't Write is a quiet collection, but it is not a halting or timid one. Minot still has a poet's instinct for the surprising volta, the striking image, the bracing final line. After 30 years away from the short story, it is good to have her back, cleareyed and fearless as ever, whispering difficult truths and ambiguities that a less assured writer would feel compelled to shout.

Publishers Weekly

06/22/2020

Minot (Thirty Girls) finds hints of violence, grief, and trauma in her characters’ interior lives in this precise, shimmering collection. In “Polepole,” American journalist Daisy regrets an affair with a married Englishman stationed in Kenya, where he slaps a boy across the face for vandalizing his Jeep. “Occupied” follows a woman walking past an Occupy Wall Street encampment in Lower Manhattan while remembering the attacks on 9/11 and reflecting on the breakup with the father of her eight-year-old son (“the place where he’d been was a ripped hole”). While the analogy to the World Trade Center’s “perpetual crater of construction” initially feels unbalanced, Minot brilliantly subverts Ivy’s self-absorption and gives her a rude awakening. Amid the conventional narratives are shorter, fragmentary stories. Of these, only the title story stands out, in which a constant, distracting stream of information passes through the narrator’s consciousness (“Your system must be overloaded. Or you have a virus”; “Fifty-three dead not including the shooter”). In “The Language of Cats and Dogs,” the collection’s strongest entry, a woman looks back on her professor’s sexual advances 40 years earlier in Boston, when she was 20, observing how the resulting fear and shame would forever alter her encounters with men. Minot’s sly, layered approach marks an impressive reimagining of 1980s minimalism. Agent: Georges Borchardt, Georges Borchardt, Inc. (Aug.)

From the Publisher

A winning blend of emotional intensity, capricious playfulness and keen-eyed observation.” —Minneapolis Star Tribune

“A winning blend of emotional intensity, capricious playfulness and keen-eyed observation.” —Minneapolis Star Tribune “Tender, precise, emotional, insightful and funny.” —Julianne Moore

“Why I Don’t Write: And Other Stories, [Minot’s] first in some thirty years, showcases her versatility. Its ten stories range from mainstream to experimental, with sundry stops in between. . . . She has an unmistakable knack for distilling things, and gorgeously, at that. . . . Taken as a whole, Minot’s collection is, by turns, spiky and intimate, adventurous, stark and lyrical. . . . Few story collections shine as brightly.” —Portland Press Herald (Maine)

“Why I Don’t Write is a quiet collection, but it is not a halting or timid one. Minot still has a poet’s instinct for the surprising volta, the striking image, the bracing final line. After thirty years away from the short story, it is good to have her back, clear-eyed and fearless as ever, whispering difficult truths and ambiguities that a less assured writer would feel compelled to shout.” —The New York Times Book Review

“Susan Minot is an author well reputed for the purity and terseness of her prose exhibited over a career of more than three decades. Her latest book, a collection of ten stories is no exception. . . . Minot excels in description of people and places. . . . [A] rewarding read.” —New York Journal of Books

“[Why I Don’t Write] is strikingly visual. Here, the light is often white, people’s heads are bullet-shaped, and the littered car of a scoundrel professor is a fish tank. At their best, the sentences are frozen frames peering at the reader, as the reader peers back, peeling new information with each read. . . . [These stories] spill with luscious sentences that scintillate.” —Chicago Review of Books

“[Minot’s] gift is for illuminating revelatory moments in characters’ lives. . . . Throughout, Minot is keenly aware of how men hurt women—as well as how women sabotage themselves.” —Kirkus Reviews

“Minot . . . finds hints of violence, grief, and trauma in her characters’ interior lives in this precise, shimmering collection.” —Publishers Weekly

Library Journal

★ 09/01/2020

In her first collection since 1989's Lust & Other Stories, the award-winning Minot (Thirty Girls) depicts characters balancing on a knife's edge, often unable to move forward. Two lovers bicker unresolvedly (and rather drolly) as they head to a wedding, the title story's writer stews about a long list of ideas she can't develop, and several stories feature women who acknowledge that they need to be more forceful. Swept up in an inappropriate affair, an American documentarian in Africa realizes that she'd missed the point where she should have stepped back, while an artist who has ridden her bicycle to Occupy Wall Street in search of a former lover—a world-famous photographer to whom she rather lamely submitted—has an accident afterward and ends up in an ambulance, "[moving] from one version of surrender to another." VERDICT Crisp, observant stories about our inactions as well as our actions; highly recommended. [See Prepub Alert, 2/4/20.]

SEPTEMBER 2020 - AudioFile

The performances by multiple narrators of Minot's collection of short stories create a collective world of fascinating life moments, and one afterlife. Minot's audiobook is filled with compelling human detail. The results are moving and occasionally shocking. Finding the perfect tone of sadness, Andrew Eiden narrates a gently heartbreaking story of a dying woman calling out to another man in the presence of her husband. Kristen Sieh conveys the startling kindness of a barista serving customers at a café for the deceased. Alex McKenna's performance navigates the emotional complexity of a young college student who absorbs the impact of a male professor propositioning her. All the performances exude a kind of detached observation while maintaining an insightful intimacy. S.P.C. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2020, Portland, Maine

Kirkus Reviews

2020-05-18
Minot's first collection since 1989 begins with a story ironically titled "Why I Don't Write."

This doesn't seem to apply to Minot herself, who has written six books since 1986, but it does suggest the psychic toll of being a writer in an age of Twitter-size attention spans and yawning cynicism. "What do you do all day?" someone asks the narrator. The answer, both to this question and the one posed by the title, comes in the form of a disorienting collage of allusions to private heartaches, post-2016 political scandals, national tragedies, domestic chores, and pointed observations. ("Women writers without children: many. Women writers with children: few.") The nine stories that follow are a mixed bag. The most successful show why sustained engagement matters, especially for a writer like Minot whose gift is for illuminating revelatory moments in characters' lives rather than experimental fiction. Sometimes these moments are tragic, as in "Boston Common at Twilight," which explores a teenager's ill-fated decision to follow a stranger, a woman, into the city to buy pot from her and, later, the heartbreaking consequence of his failure to stop blaming himself. Elsewhere, the stories turn on happy, though somewhat old-fashioned, epiphanies. In "Polepole," a woman's brief encounter with the maid of a married man with whom she's just had a one-night stand in Kenya makes her determined to take better care of herself. Throughout, Minot is keenly aware of how men hurt women—as well as how women sabotage themselves. In "The Language of Cats and Dogs," another standout, the protagonist recalls the moment her writing professor propositioned her. Rather than tell him off, she sits frozen in his disgusting car, embarrassed by his cheesy pickup line and ashamed as though she's somehow to blame.

This collection's best stories show us why Minot should resist irony and never stop writing beautifully about women's lives.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940173300263
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	08/04/2020
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

The Torch


 
She lay back on the clean white pillows.

Is that—? Who’s there? she said.

It’s me.

John? she said in a weak voice. Is that you, John? Happiness came into her tone.

Yes, it’s me, said her husband, taking her hand.

Where have you been?

I’ve been right here. You just woke up.

Are we at home?

Yes, he said. We’re at the house.

You came from—? she whispered. She shook her head. No,
she said. That’s not . . .

Is there anything I can get you, dear?

No, John.

Here, have a little water. He held up a paper cup. His hand was shaky. He managed to guide the bent straw to her lips.
 
Thank you, John, she said. Saying his name pleased her. She smiled, though her husband would have hardly called it a smile. Her face had lost most of its flesh and her profile was more pronounced, even regal.
 
She spoke with great effort. I’m thinking of the dancing, she said. Isn’t it lovely to think of? Her eyelids were low and her black eyes looked elsewhere.
 
It is, he said. He stroked her hand. Her hand had not changed so much, though her wedding band was loose beneath her knuckle. But her wrist was different, flat like a board, and her fore- arm where it emerged from her dressing gown was like a plank.
 
Have you changed the music, John?

What, dear?

I’m sorry, she said. I’m confused.

Painkillers, he said. The medicine is making you confused.
 
Her gaze flicked in his direction with a sharp bird-look, testing the soundness of this. The medicine, she said uncertainly, and nodded. What time is it?
 
He consulted his watch and after some time reported, Twenty to five.
 
In the evening, she said with suspicion.

In the evening.

They sat for a while.

Then she said, Tomorrow I think we might go to the shore.
 
We’ll see.
 
She lifted up her narrow arms and dropped them on the bedspread. Oh, God, she groaned, I’d love to swim. In lovely cold water.
 
You would like that, he said.
 
I wanted to swim with you, John. She frowned. But they served dinner so early.
 
It’s all right, he said.
 
They kept the tables apart, but everyone danced after, she said. I thought—but then she came the next day. Her mouth turned down. What did you say to her, John?
 
The man shook his head.
 
What? she said.
 
I can’t remember, the man said with resignation.
 
She was prettier than I. That, everyone knew.
 
I don’t know about that, he said.
 
Couldn’t dance as well though. But she was chic. I remember she had a really good-looking scarf and a wonderful suit. Better clothes than mine.
 
The woman’s hand waved slowly; it didn’t matter so much now.
 
You were a wonderful dancer, he said. You are.
 
Did you love her, John?
 
No, he said. I loved you.
 
The woman nodded, her expression placid, skin stretched over her cheekbones.
 
I know, she said, meaning to reassure him. I know. Her eyes closed, winglike. I wondered if you believed in Christ, she said.
 
Her husband watched her fall asleep. In their lifetime he’d watched her face go through many changes, but he could still see the first face he’d known when she walked up from the beach that day.
 
Where are we again? Her eyes stayed closed.
 
Home, in the house on Chestnut Street.
 
Oh yes. In my room.
 
In your room.
 
That’s right. Her eyes opened. You’ll stay here, John? You won’t go away?
 
I won’t go away.
 
He sat and watched her sleep, looking at her dry lips and polished forehead. Past the bed out the window, it was turning blue and he looked at his watch. The doctor was coming by after five. He stayed in the chair. He looked at his thumbs meeting each other.
 
After an uncertain amount of time there was a tap on the door. The doctor’s head appeared, the door was pushed farther ajar. Sleeping? the doctor said.
 
The man nodded.
 
Could I talk to you? the doctor said, with a twitch of his head.
 
They stood side by side at the upstairs railing, both looking down at the top of the lamp on the hall table below. I want to ask, said the doctor, how you are holding up.
 
The man stared ahead of him, not wanting to speak.
 
Andrew, said the doctor. It can be hard on a man.
 
At the mention of his name, Andrew turned to face the doctor. Yes, he said. He knew.

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