A Personal Anthology of Women Unhinged, by Lena Valencia

I’ve always been drawn to women in fiction who don’t always do the right thing. Toni Morrison’s Sula. Charlotte Brontë’s Bertha Rochester (and Jean Rhys’s Antoinette Cosway). Shirley Jackson’s Mary Katherine Blackwood. These are women who are making space for themselves in a world that would rather they not exist.

The characters in the short stories I chose for my anthology all make decisions that range from questionable to morally abhorrent. Some are seemingly minor infractions—stealing a shoe from your daughter-in-law’s closet, or buying concert tickets to see a high school fling’s band perform without telling your husband. Others have greater stakes and are less forgivable: donning a Confederate flag bikini, or, well, murder(s).

Good fiction is not a blueprint for ethical living. It asks more questions than it answers. Good fiction delves into character, makes the reader squirm because maybe they see a little bit of their own imperfect self in the protagonist that’s making these unwise choices, or perhaps feel implicated in the societal pressures that are driving the character to act in the way they do. The beauty of fiction is that it allows us to see the world through the eyes of (or at least sit in the metaphorical getaway car next to) these complex, conflicted characters.

After all, how can we expect women to remain “hinged” in a world where our rights to exist are constantly being threatened? Where we are either confined by the male gaze or ignored entirely? The same goes double for women from marginalized identities, who have a whole other set of societal expectations, constraints, and violence to contend with. One can forgive these characters for not always following the rules. But who is doing the forgiving? And who is asking for it? And who is making the rules?

Here are twelve stories—or, rather, eleven short stories and a song—that ask these questions.

‘Ghosts and Empties’ by Lauren Groff (First published in The New Yorker, July 2015 and available to subscribers to read here; collected in Florida, Riverhead, 2018)

A woman contends with her rage and anxiety by going on walks around her Florida neighborhood. Though the story opens with the narrator proclaiming “I have somehow become a woman who yells,” we never actually see her do so. Instead, we see the neighborhood: a place where there are controlled burns in parks where unhoused people shelter, where cygnets are gobbled up by otters. Under Groff’s keen eye, these descriptions of walks around the neighborhood become a treatise on the transitory, cyclical, and sometimes violent nature of all things, the melancholy that comes with watching change happen before our very eyes.

‘Lost in the City’ by Edward P. Jones (From Lost in the City, William Morrow, 1992)

Lydia Walsh, having fallen asleep with a man whose name she can’t recall, wakes up to a phone call at 3 a.m. informing her that her mother has died in her nursing home. Jittery from cocaine, she calls a cab to take her to claim her mother’s body from the nursing home and instead, instructs the driver to get her lost—perhaps an attempt to escape the barrage of memories that could be triggered by the familiar city around her, or to delay the grim task at hand, or maybe both. We’re never really sure, but the uncertainty feels intentional—choreographed by the author to make us, the readers, feel just as uneasy as Lydia does. The driver replies that as a Capitol cab driver, he “ain’t allowed to get lost.” But he drives on anyway, taking Lydia past the D.C. locations she knows so well, plunging her deeper into the memories she’s trying to avoid. Through her attempt to escape the familiar, she only becomes further entrenched in it, lost in her own memories, and though it’s uncomfortable, the reader is along for the ride.

‘The Beast’ by Megan Cummins (First published in Ninth Letter, Fall/Winter 2016-17 and collected in If the Body Allows It, University of Nebraska Press, 2020. A slightly different version is available to read at CRAFT Literary)

I’ve long been fascinated by fiction that deals with deception, and ‘The Beast’ is an excellent example. Beverly buys tickets to see a high school fling in concert without telling her husband. As the story progresses, we learn that her lie is a small one in the scope of the lies that the men in her life have entangled her in. Cummins toys with an enticing will they/won’t they narrative between Beverly and her boss; Beverly and her high school fling. Redemption, however, doesn’t come from finding a man, but in finding freedom from the deceitful men in her life. Cummins isn’t shy about using issues related to healthcare and money to drive the conflicts in her stories, a refreshing dose of realism that feels lacking in a lot of contemporary fiction.

‘A Little Burst’ by Elizabeth Strout (First published in The New Yorker, June 1998, and available to subscribers to read here. Collected in Olive Kitteridge, Random House, 2008)

I really could have chosen any of the stories in this book, which is a beautiful example of how linked stories can—piece by piece—build a character as vivid and alive as Olive Kitteridge, in a way that simply wouldn’t work in the form of a novel. We all know an Olive; we’ve all been an Olive. The present action in ‘A Little Burst’ takes place entirely in Olive Kitteridge son’s bedroom three hours after his wedding, where Olive has isolated herself to escape the noise of the party and eavesdrop, a slice of blueberry cake concealed in her handbag. Of course, she hears her daughter-in-law dispense with some unkind comments that were not meant for her ears. Of course, being Olive, she takes her own unique form of revenge. There are many reasons a story like this shouldn’t work. Olive is a passive observer, for example, and most of the important scenes in the story are delivered through flashback, but Strout weaves it all together seamlessly with her rich character detail and Olive’s sad, stubborn wisdom.

‘Bridezilla’ by Kim Fu (First published in Lesser-Known Monsters of the 21^st Century, Tin House, 2022. Also available to read online at Oprah Daily)

The opening line of ‘Bridezilla’ introduces two questions: a marriage proposal, and the possibility of a mysterious sea monster off the shores of the coastal city where Leah, the protagonist, resides. Leah assents to her partner’s lukewarm proposal, but spends the entirety of the wedding planning fretting over her decision. There was a time she imagined a fairytale wedding on a beach, now she’s not so sure. She’s not sure about a lot of things. Her trajectory throughout the story is one of indecision and uncertainty. Reading “Bridezilla,” I became so wrapped up in Leah’s anxiety that I almost forgot about the sea monster, until, well, I didn’t. On its surface, ‘Bridezilla’ is about a woman getting cold feet; but lurking beneath that familiar premise is a chilling fable about the very contemporary anxieties of planning for a future in the midst of impending ecological collapse.

‘Nemecia’ by Kirstin Valdez Quade (First published in Narrative, and available to read here. Collected in Night at the Fiestas, Norton, 2015, as well as in Best American Short Stories 2013)

The strength of this story is in the ways it withholds information to keep us grounded in the point of view of a child, in this case Maria, Nemecia’s younger cousin, who both looks up to, fears and is jealous of her older cousin. The fibs that Nemecia tells Maria—that she killed her mother and put her grandfather in a coma—cover up a darker secret that is revealed later in the story. ‘Nemecia’ is a stunning example of how a novel’s-worth of family secrets and complex relationships can be deftly condensed in a couple-dozen pages.

‘Women! In! Peril!’ by Jessie Ren Marshall (From Women! In! Peril!, Bloomsbury, 2024)

Told through a series of short dispatches from a passenger on spacecraft carrying sleeping women to populate Planet B after Earth is all but destroyed, the title story of Jessie Ren Marshall’s collection is imbued with her signature blend of humor, heart, and terror.  There’s a moment I found particularly resonant, where the narrator ponders the usefulness of narrative in a world that’s been lost: “IDK why our stories have to make sense when the world doesn’t.” But “Women! In! Peril!” does make sense, in the sad logic of tragedy. It’s also reminiscent of Covid-era lockdown, when for a time it did feel like we were the only people awake on a spaceship, typing our little thoughts out to the void in an attempt to make contact, barreling towards terrors unknown.

‘G’ by Ling Ma (First published in Zoetrope: Allstory. Collected in Bliss Montage, FSG, 2022)

The titular G refers to a fictional drug that makes you invisible. It was a drug that best friends Bea and Bonnie did together often when they were in college—too often, in fact. Years later and cleaned up, Bea visits Bonnie for a final farewell before leaving New York to enroll in PhD program on in California. Bonnie presents her with a parting gift: a dose of G. Woven throughout this fateful last trip is the story of a friendship that veers into unhealthy codependence and then to flat out self-destruction as both girls contend with body image and identity struggles. The best addiction narratives show us the elation that comes with using, and Ling Ma makes G-induced invisibility so tantalizing: it “lifts the tiny anvil of self-consciousness… Just go out and voyeur around, nothing but a Guston eyeball bouncing down Amsterdam…” A standout story in one of my favorite collections in recent memory.

‘Winter Chemistry’ by Joy Williams (First published in The Paris Review, Spring 1974, as ‘A Story about Friends’, and available to subscribers to read here. Collected in Taking Care, Random House, 1985, and also in The Visiting Privilege, Vintage, 2015)

Julep and Judy are teenagers in a charmless seaside town who sneak away to spy on their chemistry teacher each night. An innocent enough premise that, in the hands of a lesser writer, might turn into a saccharine coming-of-age tale about the girls’ budding sexuality. And it is a coming-of-age tale, in the sense that coming of age as a woman means confronting the dangers that lurk in the dark corners of daily existence. Williams is an expert at subtext and withholding. Woven throughout the story are hints of blood and menace that foreshadow the final, violent scene. I first read this story on a trash-strewn beach in July, marveling at the deliberate way Williams crafts each crystalline sentence, chilled despite the summer heat.

‘Boys Go to Jupiter’ by Danielle Evans (First published in The Sewanee Review, Fall 2017, and available for subscribers to read here. Collected in The Office of Historical Corrections, Riverhead, 2020)

At what point does inaction become action? This is the question at the heart of Danielle Evans’s cogent narrative of a young white woman’s flirtation with some of the uglier factions of her identity. When a photo of Claire in a Confederate flag bikini goes unintentionally viral, she must reckon with the fallout on the campus of her small liberal arts college. Rather than apologize, Claire doubles down and sides with her small but vocal group of defenders. This story is all the more poignant considering it was published in 2017, before the term “cancel culture” was ceaselessly lobbed around by pundits. 

‘Our Lady of the Quarry’ by Mariana Enríquez, translated by Megan McDowell (First published in The New Yorker, December 2020, and available to subscribers to read here. Collected in The Dangers of Smoking in Bed, Hogarth, 2021)

Mariana Enríquez understands the power of teenage girls, and this story is a bleak testament to that power. Told in the collective first person, ‘Our Lady of the Quarry’ chronicles a group of them who go to great lengths to win the attention of an older boy they have a crush on. When their wiles fail to attract him and he begins to date an older friend of theirs, things turn ugly. Like all great horror stories, ‘Our Lady’ starts off in an ordinary fashion with relatively run-of-the mill bitchiness from our jealous narrators. Slowly, however, bits of their feral nature are revealed. ‘Our Lady’ is a sparkling example of how teen obsession can quickly topple over into violence; how a perfect sunny day swimming at the quarry can become a sweaty, heat-drenched nightmare.

‘The Curse of Millhaven’ by Nick Cave (From Murder Ballads, Mute Records, 1996)

So far, all the stories on this list have been morally ambiguous—this one is decidedly not so. It’s also not technically a short story, but a song. I included it on this list because it has the arc and narrative twists and turns of a great short story, not to mention attention to detail that becomes even more impressive when executed in the meter of song lyrics (“Stinky Bohoon and his friend with the pumpkin-sized head”). Cave paints a whole small town (blood red) in this murder ballad about the teenage Loretta, who kills according to an adage her mother relayed to her: “All God’s children/they all gotta die!” There’s something sickeningly delightful about an antihero who has no qualms about the violence she commits, a point that gets hammered home in the final moments of the song:

They ask me if I feel remorse and I answer, "Why of course!
There's so much more I could have done if they'd let me!"

​* Lena Valencia is the author of the short story collection Mystery Lights, published by Tin House (US) and Dead Ink (UK). Her fiction has appeared in BOMB, Electric Literature, Ninth Letter, Epiphany, the anthology Tiny Nightmares, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of a 2019 Elizabeth George Foundation grant and holds an MFA in fiction from The New School. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, where she is the managing editor and director of educational programming at One Story and the co-host of the reading series Ditmas Lit. 

* You can browse the full searchable archives of A Personal Anthology, with over 3,000 story recommendations, at www.apersonalanthology.com. 

* A Personal Anthology is curated by Jonathan Gibbs, author of two novels, Randall, and The Large Door, and a book-length poem, Spring Journal. He teaches on the MA/MFA Creative Writing at City, University of London.

* And if you are interested in contributing your own Personal Anthology to the project, then please let me know by replying to this email. I’m always on the lookout for guest editors!

* Finally, if you enjoy this Substack you might enjoy Creative Digest, a collaborative Substack produced by the Creative Writing team at City, and to which I contribute. Read the latest edition and subscribe here.