You Think It I'll Say It by Curtis Sittenfeld

I do not like short stories as a rule, but I have been a long term fan of this author, and it is a Reese Witherspoon Book Club pick, so I traded in the print version for an audio version, and listened to it while I was recovering from shoulder replacement surgery. One of the things I do not care for about short stories is that there just isn't enough time to get to know people. The social and domestic relationships of the characters, figuratively speaking, all sound the same because of time constraints. They are of a type, cut from the same piece of cloth – not genuinely reflective of that real frisson of weirdness and fear that can ensue when you realise you have no comprehension either of what someone else is thinking or what they are capable of thinking. This author's stories and their inhabitants don’t feel like that: they are much less tidy and, consequently, riskier. They explore what are frequently unresolvable tensions, especially between women: the journalist (another) who leaves her breastfeeding baby with a sitter in order to interview an actress, only for the interviewee to reveal her traumatic miscarriage. The tragicomic setup – the writer conceals her motherhood but is then exposed by her leaking breasts and the sitter’s panicked calls – leads to an impossible complex of competing empathies and sympathies. The situations of your past catching up with you run through this collection, and there is a lot to think about here.