Abstract

This collection of twelve stories was written between 2012-2016. The stories explore the theme of women’s identity and anxiety in the face of it. In order to make the anxiety attending these typically female experiences come alive for the reader as subjectively as possible these stories were all re-written in the first person.

With this collection I seek to trouble the conventional distance between the author, reader and narrator of realistic fiction. The title character of the title story shares the author’s name. Championed by queer and feminist modernist writers Jean Genet and Marguerite Duras in France and postmodernists Kathy Acker and Chris Kraus in America, autofiction has long been a means of populating narrative with subjectivities and experiences normally excluded from it. This shift into autofiction in the final story of the collection is an effort to cement referentiality (meaning and subject) as the aim of the text, supplanting the formalist concerns that define literary merit. Thus, encouraging the reader to see this short story collection as a work of outsider art. The stories preceding the title story are immersive and plot driven in order to provide the reader characters in whom they can provisionally believe, so that they can experience the moral and imaginative pleasure of experiencing the inner worlds of fictional others. This traditional reading experience is disrupted in the collection’s title story in order to dramatize subversive reflection and affirm its power, once the meaning and value of the world these marginal female characters inhabit have been assumed by the reader on the character’s behalf.