“I knew I liked sex. I just couldn’t get enough practice...Well, my wife has a customary sympathetic manner and she enjoys breast play. Her mother told me.”
Williams’s stories are meticulously crafted puzzle boxes that, even after multiple readings, are slow to reveal their secrets. Her stories lack the familiar trappings of narrative fiction; plot, setting, consistent point of view. Their fragmented construction demand full attention, forcing the reader to look for throughlines and contend with the unknown.
What is happening is a question I asked myself a lot while reading this collection. And though I am unable to recall plot points, I am able to say that Williams’s stories dwell in the domestic, often focusing on small moments between friends, partners, and strangers, each one drawing the reader’s attention to the sadness, confusion and joy that can accompany emotional and physical intimacy.
With most stories no more than a page long, Williams works with extreme precision and is able to distill whole lives into just three paragraphs. It is a trick she performs over and over in a million different ways, each story revealing a new facet of the human experience.
Don’t be discouraged if you don’t understand every story. I found it more enjoyable to embrace Williams’s enigmatic prose than to struggle against it, letting myself delight in its eccentricities and marvel at its strangeness.