At a time when many of us are feeling low, Amy Stuber’s debut story collection, Sad Grownups, accepts this truth and, in doing so, helps reorient us to something like a middle ground. The stories embrace the rawness of life, its trauma, failure, despondency, grief, how our hurt little kid selves never really leave us, and yet there are moments when we are okay and continue on.
That Stuber’s work so perfectly hits a chord with the state of the world is of no surprise. Her stories, which have been published widely in esteemed literary magazine such as Ploughshares and American Short Fiction, demonstrate again and again that she is a fierce observer of life. She chooses each word with the same care and intentionality that she brings to her participation in the literary community as an editor for Split Lip Magazine, a craft teacher, and an advocate of short form fiction.
The 17 stories in Sad Grownups are each their own capsule that deftly break story writing norms. There are ars poetica moments and fourth-wall breaking moments like in the titular story Sad Grownups where we are told, “This is a love story. Or really, maybe it’s a story of wanting but not understanding love, and maybe that’s the saddest love story of all.” There are unique plot structures like “Day Hike” which begins as a couple hiking story, then zooms out to an evening with the story’s author where her more successful writer friend gives her feedback on the hiking story. And there is the powerful use of point of view, like in “Our Female Geniuses” where, as if we are there mingling with the guests at the cocktail party, there is a smooth shifting to five different close third person perspectives. All of it undermines tradition and in doing so takes us to a rich new place of wonder.
For her avid fans, particularly those of her flash fiction, this too is of no surprise. But part of the magic of Sad Grownups is in how the stories speak to each other. This dialogue leaves us with beautiful reverberations around themes of environmental degradation, women’s bodies under the male gaze, sexual empowerment and objectification, and, as the title suggests, adulting. While adulting is the backbone of this collection it’s a particular form of adulting, the Mother, that truly touches every single story.
The Mothers in this collection come in many forms. There are Ghost Moms like in “Day Hike”: “Her ghost mom says, You’ve always been so needy, Renee, because this was a lesson Renee’s mom gave her: to be tough and unyielding was preferable to being ready to receive love …” There are Sad Moms like the unnamed main character in “More Fun in the New World” whose father committed suicide and her Mom’s “hands hold onto the bead as if she is in water, sinking, and they might keep her afloat.” There are Peripheral Moms that drink in the living room with their sisters or are the only ones texting their children. There are people who aren’t sure about whether they want to be Moms or for whom it never happened. And, just once, we meet the Overprotective Mom, moms actually, of “Dead Animals” who, after finding their injured daughter Kyle, “were frantic, grabbing, leaning, and there was a beauty to it, as if in this moment they could secure Kyle, affix her to them, stop all the ways time was going to come for them.”
Most of all there are Bad Moms, the ones that commit filicide, kidnap, and abandon their children just when those children needed a Mom the most. Importantly though, the Bad Moms have layers and are given the kinds of context for their badness. Like Sasha’s Mom in “Corvids and Their Allies,” who kidnapped him and his sister to join a death cult and yet, we come to understand the intensity she experienced in those early caregiving years where, “Her worry then was a bag she dragged behind her always.” In all their forms, the Mother is shown to be an extension of who we all are, full of the same flaws and ineptitudes that pulse through everyone.
At the end of the final story of this collection, “The Last Summer,” the narrator says, “Really, all of life is contained in a day anyway. Wake up its own little birth, and sleep a death, and all of whatever in between.” I think all of life is contained in this book. Birth, uncertainty whether to birth, decisions not to birth, inability to birth. Death in all its simply awful and completely expected ways. And all the whatever in between which is the very thing we try to survive everyday.
Sad Grownups, by Amy Stuber. Fairfax, Virginia: Stillhouse Press, October 2024. 232 pages. $16.00, paper.
Tara Van De Mark is a recovering attorney now writer based in Washington, DC. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart, Best Small Fictions, The Best of the Net, and has recently appeared in BULL, Lincoln Review, GoneLawn, Citron Review, and Tiny Molecules. She can be found at taravandemark.com and lurks around X/Twitter and Bluesky @TaraVanDeMark.
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