What She Left Me : Stories and a Novella
Doenges, Judy
ISBN 10: 0874519373 / ISBN 13: 9780874519372
Published by University Press of New England, 1999
Bibliographic Details
Title: What She Left Me : Stories and a Novella
Publisher: University Press of New England
Publication Date: 1999
Binding: Hardcover
Book Condition: Very Good
Edition: 1st.
About this title
Synopsis:
These fine stories of marginal, blue-collar people, many of them lesbian or gay, living difficult lives far removed from urban glamor or the fast lane of
pop or gay culture, are unsentimentally yet sensitively told by Judy Doenges. They render well the humanity and the sadness of some of contemporary
fiction's most unforgettable characters.
Review:
The characters in Judy Doenges's edgy What She Left Me are self-appointed outsiders: gamblers, petty criminals, men and women on the fringe of both
gay and straight worlds. Chic, gin-soaked mothers haunt these stories, as do cops. There are guns, dubious inheritances, and a pervasive sense of
emotional anomie. Caught in a police spotlight at the end of "Crooks," a teenager imagines that "this was the kind of light that would follow me to the
police station, then to my home, even on to college, where I would be forever squinting and cringing under someone's scrutiny, never quite measuring up,
never quite fitting in." In "MIB," the narrator's lover abandons her in search of someone who "lives here, outside, with the rest of us." Even the sense of
family offered by the lesbian community is suspect. "As far as I was concerned"--according to the narrator of "Incognito"--"gay people made up an
amorphous, loose, happy group, pairing up for love but still remaining outlaws. This family business seemed too familiar and dangerous. An old idea like
that made the present very confusing."
Of course, it's hard to write about alienation without leaving the reader disconnected as well. The two best stories in Doenges's collection sidestep this
problem by anchoring themselves firmly in the physical world. In the title piece, a waitress named Sandra obsessively catalogs the contents of her dead
mother's house: barware, swimsuits, two aging Great Danes, the father's leather address book that he abandoned along with his family. Doenges switches
gears in the masterful final novella, "God of Gods," in which a touchingly unworldly butcher named Odin Tollefson struggles with the changing social
landscape of Chicago in the '70s--and his own attraction to a male coworker. Odin is something Doenges's other characters are not: engaged, palpably
eager to love, to be loved, and to do the right thing. His story concludes with the sweetly redemptive sight of a bed sheet being folded back: "To Odin it
was as if the earth had burst open beneath him and brought forth a newly minted, gleaming city." It's the book's only happy ending, and its most satisfying
one, also. --Mary Park
