Annell López’s first book, I’ll Give You A Reason, is masterclass in writing about people on the margins. The winner of the 2023 Louise Meriwether First Book Prize from Feminist Press, this short-story collection delves into themes of exclusion on the grounds of citizenship, race, and mental illness.
Set in New Jersey, a haunting sense of grief is present in these stories, which often center the feeling of not feeling at home. Despite their darker themes, there is a solid seam of hope that prevents us from collapsing into total despair. The women of these stories are whip-smart, powerfully observant, funny, and horny.
Much like Carmen Maria Machado in Her Body and Other Parties, López puts female eroticism at the center of her stories. One example of this is in the story called “The Other Carmen.” In this story, a plus size woman of color finds a porn star with her same name on the internet. This other Carmen becomes a role model for the main character, inspiring her sexual liberation. In a scene in a therapist’s office, our protagonist tells her doctor about the porn star she idolizes:
What I love most about the other Carmen is her abandon. Where some women constrict their bodies into poses that bring absolutely no pleasure, the other Carmen doesn’t. She fucks lazily; her languid body often melts into a tufted duvet, her limbs splayed unflatteringly.
In the end, the protagonist decides to seek out a new form of a pleasure, one that is not predicated on the perfect female body or the perfect pose. In this book, López writes about female arousal that does not cater to the male gaze or sometimes does not feature men at all. While reading this book, I was reminded of bell hooks’ declaration that the wish for social progress is inextricably bound with the quest for sexual pleasure. The sexual empowerment of these characters is an example of women enact agency in a society that attempt to strip them of it—in these stories, I read the focus on female eroticism as a form of hope.
Throughout this collection, we are reminded of the small ways in which one can survive the unsurvivable, whether it be through humor, sex, love, food, or intelligence. It’s true that a razor-sharp eye that spares no one is ever-present in López’s fiction. At times, this book is laugh out loud funny. One humorous moment takes place in the story “Darth Vader.” In this story, a high school dropout is having an affair with her married boss, Mateo, who keep sending her dick pics. At one point, she becomes frustrated with their generation differences:
I stopped at the foot of the stairs to check my phone, which kept vibrating in my pocket. One missed call, one voicemail, and a text message. All from Mateo. I opened his message: a picture of a bulge poking through the open zipper of his navy slacks.
Is that yours? I replied. I waited for him to respond.
Forty wasn’t that old, but for some reason it always took him forever to text back.
I found I’ll Give You A Reason often lead me into unexpected places. Whether it be surprising moments of humor, sensuality, or pure zaniness, there was something delightfully unstable about the people in these stories. Her fiction uses conflicts between people to speak broader themes, so it stimulates the heart and the brain at once.
In “The World as We Know It,” a white woman calls Childhood Protective Services on an undocumented family because she suspects they are abusing their child. Though innocent, this family has to flee their home due to fears about deportation, which destroys the white woman’s self-image as a savior.
In the stories of this collection, white people are portrayed as lost in their own myths of self-grandeur and victimhood. In a literary canon where whiteness is so often silent, in the words of scholar Richard Dyer, López “makes whiteness strange.” In this book, whiteness is undesirable, messy, and unaware of itself, yet López’s representation never falls into the trap of cliché. Her characters feel like real people, unaware of their flaws, but palpable all the same. As a white woman reading this book, I felt like López’s stories helped me form a more conscious relationship to my own race. We should all read López’s fiction, regardless of who we are, to learn more about the structural inequities of the country we live in.
When read as a collection, these stories make us laugh, feel sad, angry, horny, but mostly bewildered. Bewildered by the country we live in. How the deprivation of belonging can haunt a whole community, leaving its people with a sense of unassailable grief. These stories capture the heartbreak and the grief of our current moment of social divide.
I’ll Give You a Reason, by Annell López. New York, New York: Feminist Press, April 2024. 208 pages. $16.95, paper.
Vanessa Saunders is a professor of practice at Loyola University New Orleans. Her feminist, experimental novel, The Flat Woman, won the Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize and is forthcoming from University of Alabama Press and FC2 in November of 2024. Her hybrid work, fiction, and poetry has appeared in Seneca Review, Los Angeles Review, Sycamore Review, Passages North, and PANK among others. Born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, she received her MFA from Louisiana State University. She is at work on a novel.
Check out HFR’s book catalog, publicity list, submission manager, and buy merch from our Spring store. Follow us on Instagram and YouTube. Disclosure: HFR is an affiliate of Bookshop.org and we will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase. Sales from Bookshop.org help support independent bookstores and small presses.
Heavy Feather Review 