Touchy Subjects: Stories

I'm not actually a fan of short stories at all. They typically don't let you get into the heart of a character enough to make it worthwhile. Frequently they lack any character development at all. Not so with Donoghue's stories. She pulls you in to her characters and leaves you wanting more, but not feeling denied. I was pleasantly surprised.

is a short story collection by Emma Donoghue, whose work I really, really like. I like her humor and the melancholy touch a lot of her work has. Her characters always feel very real, they have flaws and ups and downs. This collection includes stories she has gathered under the headings babies, domesticity, desire and death. The characters come from all walks of life, background etc. (if you're looking for a collection of all-lesbian stories this isn't it). As with all collections I liked some stories better than others but I enjoyed them all. My favorite stories are "Touchy Subjects", the story of a single woman and her best friend's husband meeting in a hotel room to make a baby and "The Welcome", which takes place in an all-woman housing co-op.

Touchy Subjects, is the title, and they are! As my reading partner put it, "Nothing seems too odd or too off limits for her to write about - AND rope us into. I guess once you have written about a woman who churns out rabbits, you can handle just about any topic." Emma's former book of short stories, The Woman Who Gave Birth To Rabbits, gets its title from the lead story, which is about a.... [go figure!] woman who feined giving birth to rabbits! That book was excellent too, but this new one is even better. Touchy Subjects: Babies, Domesticity, Strangers, Desire, and Death, and the stories found in each of these categories stay very centered around these themes. These are nineteen deeply rich tales of the joys and struggles [mostly struggles] of love relationships, both heterosexual and homosexual. And familial. And marital. Of friendships platonic and otherwise. Of people reaching toward self-identity. Sometimes finding it, sometimes not. I think that Emma Donoghue is "eccentric" in the best sense of the word. Unconventional, slightly strange, and just off kilter enough to show her readers that they are the same! That none of our lives are simple, or even normal. Her stories reveal a world full of ambiguities and contradictions, which is exactly the world any truly living person experiences. She can take the most common of occurences [a woman looking at a clothes rack, a man writing phrases in the sand, someone looking absently and curiously through a woman's cosmetic case, a couple deciding upon the exact shade their house ought to be painted, the love of our pets, a 42-year old woman wanting to bear a child].... she can take these things and show us that they are all touchy [as in sensitive, delicate] subjects. I realize I have not really said anything specific about the writer's style [per se] or her incomparable command of dialogue. I don't want to. I want you to READ HER.

Emma Donoghue's latest collection of short stories is extraordinary. Each story is a perfectly polished gem, with the depth of characterization and emotion that you would expect from a great novel. And she's funny, too. Donoghue captures the family, with all its pain and humor, and her wry and compelling observations on relationships are not to be missed. If AOL allowed it, I would give this collection ten stars.

In typical fashion, Donoghue adds a touch of irony to the title story, "Touchy Subjects", a thirty-eight-year old woman resorting to artificial means to accomplish pregnancy; the complications, while hilarious, are perfectly awful, a testament to the author's penchant for seeing beyond the surface of our encounters with destiny. It is in the nature of these stories to observe the characters through a series of transitions, captured in five stages: Babies, Domesticity, Strangers, Desire and Death. The stories are related in a chronology of relationships: Babies about tentative beginnings, the impulses that alter the course of a life ("Expecting", "The Man Who Wrote on Beaches"); Domesticity unveils more advanced relationships, people caught in the complexities of daily frustrations, decisions and miscommunications, the small irritations that once were endearing now wearing thin, expectations denied, the infinite grinding down of hopes into less than what was anticipated ("Lavender's Blue", "The Cost of Things"). Strangers portends escape into more neutral territory, breaking from habit to find respite in another place, at least temporarily, exposing personal conceits, characters shocked into personal insights ("The Sanctuary of Hands", WritOr"); Desire speaks for itself, of yearning and angst and disappointment ("Speaking in Tongues", The Welcome"); and finally, Death, endings and sometimes beginnings, perceptions turned upside down by reality and the need to adapt to changed circumstances ("The Dormition of the Virgin", "Enchantment'). Unfailing, Donoghue prods the tender underbelly of human frailty, ever complicated and fraught with self-doubt, self-seeking behavior in search of connections, relentlessly dissecting the common denominator of relationships, straight or gay, the steady pulse of yearning that causes people to cling to one another in desperation. This is a world filled with the varieties of human behavior, the sequence of stories carefully structured for maximum effect, interactions that define the various stages of development. More than a collection, Touchy Subjects has a theme, a progression viewed through the eyes of characters as they muddle through the passages of their lives. There are moments of hilarity, sweetness, insight and revelation, a kaleidoscope of humanity writ large on a canvas as intricate as those who people the pages. Observant, incisive and compassionate, Donoghue masters both form and content; whether mining the past or mapping the edges of the present, this is a writer who never disappoints. Luan Gaines/ 2006.