Love’s Perils, Trauma’s Wounds: New Story CollectionsPosted in Articles, Book/Video Reviews, Media Archive, United States on 2021-10-21 18:18Z by Steven |
Love’s Perils, Trauma’s Wounds: New Story Collections
The New York Times
2021-10-15
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.