Out of the Girls' Room and Into the Night: Stories

I don't know why I waited so long to read this stellar collection. I agree with the other reviewers--the very best selections might be "Flowers in the Dustbin" and "Grog" and "Poison in the Human Machine," and of course the title story, but they're all good with moments or lines that are amazing. There is geniune emotion in Nissen's stories, and geniune insight in girls growing up, which is what I look for and hope for but rarely ever find. I haven't enjoyed a book so much since Jennifer Paddock's novel, A SECRET WORD, came out in the spring. It's that good! I couldn't recommend OUT OF THE GIRLS' ROOM AND INTO THE NIGHT more highly.

Book ReviewsBY AMANDA EYRE WARD November 26, 1999: Out of the Girls' Room and Into the Night by Thisbe Nissen The expression of love is the center of Out of the Girls' Room and Into the Night, an awe-inspiring collection of short stories by Thisbe Nissen, winner of the John Simmons Short Fiction Award. Nissen's characters are young and yearning, and they come together in lovely and unexpected ways. A young video clerk in "The Mushroom Girl" pours his heart out into his beloved's intercom: "I think you think I'm crazy, and I'm not. I'm not crazy. It's just that I see a chance for something I think could make me happy in a world that is a generally not very happy place, and I can't just give up and walk away from that without doing everything I know how to do to make it happen." This flustered suitor is probably the most eloquent in the book; Roz Rozenzweig in "The Rather Unlikely Courtship of Edwin Anderson and Roz Rosenzweig" proposes marriage by calling to her lover, "C'mon, Gimp, waddaya say?" Words are not the only means of admitting love in Nissen's stories. In "Accidental Love," Lilith, a high school senior, listens to an older woman who tells her, "Love is an entity unto itself. There are patches of it all over the place. It's not really tangible, but it's there, pools of it." Lilith takes the woman's words to heart when she finds Steff, the boy she loves, fixing lights underneath a Christmas tree: "The TV is perched on a rolling cart, and I wheel it over to where we can watch before I crawl underneath the tree myself. I curl around Steff and bury my hands into the wool belly of his sweater, and we just lie like that for a while: spoons under the tree in this pocket of candle-blue." Although Nissen's characters are generally young and blessed -- traveling Deadheads, college housemates, wealthy New York teens -- Nissen bestows them with earnesty and explores their desires carefully and with gravity. This is a marked change from the cynical city gals currently in fashion in contemporary literature, and I found myself astonishingly moved by her character's simplest movements, like those of the lovers in "Fundamentals of Communication." In a college classroom, the lovers "sit, shifting occasionally, glancing at the glowing wall clock, waiting for 9:15. I can't see them as well now, in the shadows, but I catch the occasional movement in one of their hands, the caress of a finger, press of palm." They seem to have realized another character's observation that safety is "a point of contact." And perhaps, Nissen suggests, that's what love is as well.

Nissen's quirky characters will charm you utterly, and her writing is just beautiful. She manages to be poignant and moving without ever being sappy--with smart, wry humor to boot. Very impressive.

Thisbe Nissen's debut is incredibly fulfilling. I became extremely engrossed in the stories, and am hungry for more of her work. The stories range from insightful slices of New York City, the midwest, and New England, to moving vignettes of family memories. The stories are sharp, edgy, and made me laugh and cry (really!). The author has an uncanny ability to cull seemingly everyday experiences into insightful musings on the lives of twenty-something intelligent women. Get this book for yourself, and give it out as a present!

I was very much impressed by this book. Nissen's stories really live on the page, and many of them have been difficult for me to forget. Usually, I'll read through a story collection in a day or two, but I found myself reading this one more slowly: I wanted to hold on to each story for a while--to let the feelings it touched off in me finish washing through me before I moved on. I was reminded of the writing of Abby Frucht, and Elizabeth McCracken, and (a little bit) of Lorrie Moore: Thisbe Nissen has the same talent that they do for opening the joy of her characters up into pain, and vice versa. Also, her characters have the same sort of camouflaged vulnerability. Too much of the fiction being published today seems to deny that people can matter to one another, that they can either hurt one another or preserve one another, but Nissen never forgets this. Even when her characters try to close themselves off to the people around them, those people always come bounding back into their lives. This book is being published by a university press and deserves a wider readership than I'm afraid it's going to get. If you have a chance, you should pick it up. The stories carry a real emotional power, and they will stay with you for a long time.