If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This

(Though I read this book back in September and wrote a little review, I never posted it. Here it is, now.)

Somewhere in the middle of Robin Black’s debut short story collection If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This: Stories I found myself staring at one of the half blank pages between stories and thinking of Stephen Dunn’s poem, “A Secret Life.” This happens to me, occasionally. A phrase or mood invoked by the book in my hands will catch on some old bit of reading stuck in my head, like a sleeve caught on a protruding nail and I’ll be called out of the moment, forced to pause and free myself. I thought of the lines that finish the poem. “It’s why your silence if a kind of truth. / Even when you speak to your best friend, / the one who’ll never betray you, / you always leave out one thing; / a secret life is that important.” It wasn’t until I paused long enough to recall the poem that I felt the thread being pulled through the collection, and saw how carefully each story examined the secret life. Do we each truly have one? Can we protect it? How do we keep from letting it swallow us whole? 

In the acknowledgements of the book, Black notes that it took her eight years to write the ten stories that comprise the collection. It seems both surprising and fitting, given how effortless each story feels. It is easy to forget that a great deal of hard work goes into writing stories that are nearly faultless. Written in clear and concise prose that has been compared to Alice Munro and Lorrie Moore, the stories in If I loved You, I Would Tell You This push at the secret lives of a variety of characters. In “The Guide” a father faces his blind daughter’s impending departure from home alongside what this will mean for the identity he has built for himself. In “Immortalizing John Parker” an elderly painter is forced to examine a dying man sitting for his portrait at the same moment she must also examine a loss of her own. Each of these characters stands apart from the others, skirting around their inner lives or looking for ways to bring divergent threads together again.

The collection is home to a myriad of different characters, each telling their stories from different points of view. Some seem guilty and some less so, some are observing while others are acting and despite these differences, it is impossible not to feel pulled down to the page. This is never more true than in the title story, narrated by a terminally ill woman speaking to a neighbor intent on erecting a tall fence between their properties.

“If I loved you, I would invite you in, sit you down in our kitchen, and I would say to you: You just never know. You, the yeti. You don’t know why this matters so much to is, why we care. You don’t know what secret pains we have that we haven’t share with you. You don’t know us.

But then I would have to admit that I don’t know everything either, wouldn’t I? Like I don’t know why it matters so much to you to build that fence exactly there.

What happened in your life that makes a property line mean so much?”

Each truth in If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This is unsteady and fragile. In the particularly elegant story, “Harriet Elliot” two fourth graders grapple with the very adult hurts and betrayals that have leaked into their lives. In a scene that resonates throughout the collection one girl tells the other how to perform a ritual with the words, “’Start by writing: This is the wish that is dearest to my heart.’” In so many ways, reading Black’s writing is being invited into these moments when we all must look at our own silences, our own kinds of truth and write down what is dearest to our own hearts.

Comments

[Laura]

Thanks for the review. I'll have to check this book out. And eight years for the ten stories...I love hearing how long writers take to complete a short story collection (especially a debut collection). Of course, I don't really know how long mine took because in the beginning, I didn't think of the stories I was working on as part of a collection. But I think about 5 years sounds right for mine.