You Never Get It Back

by Cara Blue Adams

Overview

The linked stories in Cara Blue Adams’s precise and observant collection offer elegantly constructed glimpses of the life of Kate, a young woman from rural New England, moving between her childhood in the countryside of Vermont and her twenties and thirties in the northeast, southwest, and South in pursuit of a vocation, first as a research scientist and later as a writer. Place is a palpable presence: Boston in winter, Maine in summer, Virginia’s lush hillsides, the open New Mexico sky. Along the way, we meet Kate’s difficult bohemian mother and younger sister, her privileged college roommate, and the various men Kate dates as she struggles to define what she wants from the world on her own terms.

Wryly funny and shot through with surprising flashes of anger, these smart, dreamy, searching stories show us a young woman grappling with social class, gender, ambition, violence, and the distance between longing and having.
 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781609388140
Publisher:	University of Iowa Press
Publication date:	12/15/2021
Series:	Iowa Short Fiction Award Series
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	188
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Cara Blue Adams’s fiction appears in Granta, the Kenyon Review, American Short Fiction, EPOCH, and Narrative. She is an assistant professor of creative writing at Seton Hall University. Adams lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Table of Contents

Contents I Met Loss the Other Day I You Never Get It Back Charity The Foothills of Tucson II Never Gotten, Never Had The Sea Latch At the Wrong Time, to the Wrong People Shoulder Season III Metaphor Vision Seeing Clear The Most Common State of Matter Desert Light

Editorial Reviews

10/11/2021

Adams’s ornate linked collection comprises snapshots of a woman’s life at various points of change. In the title story, Kate Bishop, a year out of Williams College and living with her depressed mother in Vermont, travels to Cambridge, Mass., to meet Esme, her wealthy former roommate, for a New Year’s Eve party. There, she is reminded of the gaping financial chasm between them, as Esme is now enrolled at Stanford for graduate work while Kate toils as a lab tech. “Charity” flashes back to Kate during a Christmas break from Williams, when her mother gets the idea to give cards to their relatives, falsely claiming that she’s donated $50 to “the poor” (“She doesn’t want the relatives to think we’re cheap,” Kate reasons). “The Foothills of Tucson” picks up with Kate addressing an estranged older lover about finally starting a grad program at 26. In “The Sea Latch,” Kate goes on a beach trip with her mother and younger sister, Agnes, and feels left out of their conversations. Throughout, Adams deploys piercing details and keen moments of Kate’s self-reflection. It’s a dynamic and memorable character study. (Dec.)

Publishers Weekly

The structural originality and expansive sweep of stories in You Never Get It Back reveal a writer of impressive insight and technical virtuosity. The depth and urgency of these stories brought to mind Alice Munro’s great collection Runaway. These stories crackle with restless vitality as women come up against the constraints of their circumstances and what it means to be in the world. Cara Blue Adams has written a modern classic of a collection, as effortless in its idiom as it is fearless in its consideration of contemporary life. These stories left me breathless.”—Brandon Taylor, judge, John Simmons Short Fiction Award

“Breathtakingly poised and possessed of a daring, interrogative delicacy, Cara Blue Adams’s stories are portholes into the inner lives of characters built with such depth of feeling that you feel you could walk around inside them for hours. Saturated with longing, loss, and brilliant plumes of joy, this is the kind of book you hold close to your heart and carry with you for years to come.”—Alexandra Kleeman, author, You Too Can Have A Body Like Mine

“These marvelous linked stories follow Kate as she navigates the turbulent waters of early adulthood, friendship, and romance. Cara Blue Adams probes the depths of the heart with sensitivity and incisiveness. Whip smart and witty, surefooted and pitch-perfect, You Never Get It Back is a terrific debut!”—Kirstin Valdez Quade, author, The Five Wounds

“Cara Blue Adams writes with immense sensitivity and precision, transforming seemingly ordinary moments into radiant insights as she charts Kate’s journey through landscapes and relationships, solitude and connection, bliss and grief. As she moves through time, Kate begins to understand—as do we—that the questions might matter even more than the answers. You Never Get It Back is a stunning debut, marking the arrival of an original and thrilling new voice.”—Laura van den Berg, author, I Hold a Wolf by the Ears

From the Publisher