Mixed Race Studies

Love’s Perils, Trauma’s Wounds: New Story Collections

The New York Times
2021-10-15

Tracy O’Neill

THE RUIN OF EVERYTHING
By Lara Stapleton
123 pp. Paloma Press. Paper, $18.

If love conquers all, in Stapleton’s second story collection it’s not clear then whether anyone wins much of anything from it. There is plenty of sex in this book, but little is erotic. Bringing someone to bed skews more toward self-medicating. The fantasy tends to begin and end with being someone worth desiring. Careening in tone from fairy tale to social satire to grim, confessional emails, these stories center on wounded devotees of intimacy. “The way I love people is to consume them,” one narrator muses. “I didn’t want him to know that I eat with love.” But carnal enterprise fails to compensate for the disappointments of broken homes, previous demoralizing romances, artistic failure and a sense of meager privilege. To the women who love too much, heterosexuality is, predictably, a prison…

Read the entire review here.

The Ruin of Everything

Paloma Press
2021-10-19
126 pages
5.98 X 9.02 X 0.3 inches
0.43 pounds
Paperback ISBN: 978-1734496550

Lara Stapleton

The Ruin of Everything tells tales of abandoned children living in adult bodies. Bastards, bi-racial half-siblings, and orphans raised by aunts, they lose their last best love through brokenness like “the impossible loop in a stress dream.” Racial ambiguity abounds and confounds US color lines. Tones stretch from lugubrious sorrow to wicked dramedy. Obstinately fluid in architecture and identity, stories range from slick Hollywood glam to essayistic musings, from traditional immigrant realism, to rehearsals of autofiction that grow more metatextual as the book goes along. Just as we think we’ve learned how to read Stapleton’s stories, they shapeshift. And yet, the pieces reflect each other, a sad-clown funhouse hall of mirrors. Through wanton experiments with character, The Ruin of Everything asks us what is important to a tale and what it means to be American in country and continents. Lovers of Clarice Lispector and Luisa Valenzuela will find much to admire here.

The ‘Heights’ of Anxiety and the Color Line: Racial Ambiguity in a Culture of Absolutes

Nerds of Color
2021-07-09

Lara Stapleton, Lecturer of English
Borough of Manhattan Community College, New York, New York

I once heard the great political philosopher and activist Angela Davis argue that Americans are so obsessed with race as an identifying feature that when we meet racially ambiguous people, we are anxious until we know on which side of the color line they fall. Upon hearing this, I was relieved by the articulation of something I had suspected was at the heart of my experience. It was like experiencing great art, that rush of adrenaline that comes with recognizing what we’ve known all along presented as fantastically new.

I say this because I am extremely racially ambiguous person, particularly in the United States where we traditionally discuss race as an absolute. I am bi-racial, Filipino and white, and I hear, from day-to-day, wildly different interpretations of who I am. I have been recently called “Kaitlin” on the train, and also described as many permutations of light brown people: Latinx, Native American, and Arab. I get Mediterranean, Jewish, and Sicilian and quite often, I am asked if I have some Black ancestry (which coincides also with being Latinx)…

Read the entire article here.