First published 2007
A teenage girl learns that throwing "like a girl" means something different than she thought. A wife discovers her husband's hidden life through his credit card statements. A mother watches her adult daughter make the same mistakes she once did. These women and nine others populate Jean Thompson's collection of interconnected stories about female experience across different life stages. Each woman faces moments when the world demands she choose between what others expect and what she knows to be true about herself. From bratty adolescents testing boundaries to mothers questioning their choices, Thompson's characters speak with voices both angry and hopeful. They navigate friendships that sustain and betray, marriages that confine and liberate, and family bonds that both wound and heal. The stories move from youth's fierce certainties to the complex compromises of adulthood, examining how women claim space in a world that often refuses to make room for them.
Genres: fiction, short-stories, family-life, contemporary, womens-studies, womens-fiction
Vibes: emotional, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: found-family, unreliable-narrator
Period: 21st-Century
291 pages · Paperback · Simon & Schuster