Cringeworthy Media

I don’t read a lot of (traditionally published, anyways) short stories – I tend to like my fiction long-form, give plots a chance to percolate, characters a chance to truly develop. It’s probably more to do with the way I write – never say in three sentences what you could meander on about for three pages – but I’ve always been sort of baffled by writers who could condense their writing into these bite-sized little chunks.

The thing about about not particularly searching out short stories, though, is that sometimes you still find them (or they find you), and if they’re good, it’s so refreshing that it makes you jealous of people who can communicate in this sort of stunning brevity. Such was the case with Robin Black’s If I Loved You I Would Tell You This.

This is not – in direct contradiction to its multicolored cover – some happy funtimes! collection of short stories: In fact, thinking back, even though there were moments of real beauty and joy and hope, what I remember most is a feel of being bruised – that each of these stories is filled with the kind of writing, and, therefore, the kind of reading, that was too-close, too-much, too-real, and ranges from discomforting to devastating. The kind of reading my empathetic/overly dramatic soul can only take so much of before she has to take a break and pretend something utterly humiliating is not going to happen next, like when I have to pause particularly cringe-worthy scenes in movies and come back to them. This book, with its very short stories, and its not being that long to begin with, took me about 4 months to read, for only this reason.

Here Black portrays pettiness, indifference, cruelties – major and minor; She freezes her characters in paralyzing indecision; She bathes them in self-righteousness that even they don’t truly buy into; She strips them bare in 3000 words or less.  The everyday minutiae of life, the problems of ‘regular’ people, the randomness & realities of just being human seem singularly suited to this type of short fiction, and Black seems suited to writing compelling short fiction.

Like every collection, there were highs and lows, hits and misses, but even the stories that I didn’t personally connect with were powerful in their honesty and truth. These were not easy reads, in fact I would go so far as to say I didn’t exactly like many of them, but they were still good ones.