Reviewed by Julienne Isaacs
A hardboiled, nicotine-stained journalist, a charming Irish romantic-turned IRA agent, innumerable twenty-somethings drinking their way through failed or failing relationships: if these aren’t the archetypes of any one age, they are archetypes all the same, and they people the pages of Katie Boland’s debut short story collection, Eat Your Heart Out.
An actress and writer described as “dividing her time between Toronto and Los Angeles,” Boland has a thespian’s eye for dramatic moments, and she makes the most of them in each of Heart’s ten character studies.
In “Tragic Hero,” Rich, a middle-aged small-town hack, befriends Maggy, a lonely teenager in need, he assumes, of protection, but the relationship quickly goes south when he takes one liberty too many. “Swelter,” voiced by seventeen-year-old Louise, describes the aftershocks of the death of Colin, a central member of her high school clique. Another story, “Monster,” exposes the hidden psychopathy of an ordinary-seeming woman on the eve of her wedding.
Boland has a natural gift for voice and her characters often feel believable. They keep to themselves, and their best thoughts are afterthoughts they’d never think to speak aloud. When her stories are at their most spare, they are most effective.
Perhaps the most successful story in the collection is “Mama.” Its narrator, Cheryl-Lee, is heavily-tattooed and, at twenty-six, already hardened by the world—specifically, an abusive childhood and futureless affair with a married man. At the opening of the story, she receives word that her estranged mother has died, and travels to her hometown to sort through the detritus of her mother’s life.
In one passage, Cheryl-Lee, looking at a photograph of her deceased parent, is forced to acknowledge her physical resemblance to a mother from whom even death hasn’t given her enough distance: “We smile the same way. Our eyes are the same shape. Her face is round like mine. We sit the same, straight-backed and never comfortable. A pain I inherited and now wear as my own.”
The ending of “Mama” is satisfying, its key themes circling back in the story: Cheryl-Lee begins the tale lying in bed and ends it lying in bed, and the character development she’s undergone in thirty pages is slight but real enough to ring true.
Significant problems plague the collection as a whole, however. The general feel of naiveté that runs throughout Heart isn’t problematic in and of itself, but it is a factor in the failure of these stories to launch past their adolescent preoccupations. Lines and even titles seem borrowed from indie rock hits (“Forever Ago,” for instance, begins with the line, “To Marianne, forever ago”—lovers of Hipster darling Bon Iver will know where this is headed), and the core themes of the collection—love and sex, gained and lost—feel like an approximation of edginess, not the real thing.
In “Marianne,” for instance, the unnamed narrator bemoans the loss of his ex-girlfriend Marianne in tones that can only be described as cloying:
When Amy smiles at me, the morning light hitting her face, having left some in shadow, I see you lying next to me. There is something about her expression, the sadness under her skin… Amy falls asleep in my arms when I’m drunk and I drift into the arms of elsewhere. Elsewhere holds me.
Many of the collection’s characters seem particularly prone to infatuation, which, when it fails them, morphs into navel-gazing couched in clichés:
I don’t know how to behave between these walls anymore. I see visions dancing in front of me of how I used to be, but I don’t know her anymore. I watch the memories of her move around like I would watch a movie, with a separation and a detachment.
Even “Saturday,” narrated in the voice of an elderly woman dealing with her husband’s terminal cancer, fails to tap the rich vein of images and ideas that should accompany any life fully lived. Meryl’s most vivid memory of her relationship with Joe is of them having sex:
When they were young, the space between them was so charged that it took every part of Meryl to fight what her insides wanted… Looking at him made her drunk. She was not used to feeling so out of control. When his body was pressed against hers, she felt both empty and full.
Passages like these add energy and spice—Boland does have the ability to push boundaries and expose just enough skin in her sex scenes, drawing back before the reader wants to look away—but it is difficult to see what else they contribute. Despite their bravado, the human connections in Heart skirt the superficial, occasionally roaming dangerously close to sheer silliness.
There are unique aspects to the book that deserve mention. Each story’s first page is offset with a simple black and white photograph, taken by Boland herself, which offers an interesting visual support to the story. Spare and often funny, the photographs could have provided ample material for more appropriate cover art for Heart. A lightweight paperback, the book’s cover depicts the silhouette of a bed on a plain blue background, with the title floating in a heart-bedecked doodle—overall, a design which does nothing to distance Heart from Boland’s own youthfulness or lend the stories the gravitas they strive for.
The collection is not improved by the fact that numerous typos are scattered across its pages. The overall effect is that of a very promising first or second draft—worth reading, but unfinished, and ultimately vaguely unsatisfying.
Brindle & Glass | 240 pages | $19.95 | paper | ISBN #978-1926972930
‘Eat Your Heart Out’ by Katie Boland
Book Reviews
A hardboiled, nicotine-stained journalist, a charming Irish romantic-turned IRA agent, innumerable twenty-somethings drinking their way through failed or failing relationships: if these aren’t the archetypes of any one age, they are archetypes all the same, and they people the pages of Katie Boland’s debut short story collection, Eat Your Heart Out.
An actress and writer described as “dividing her time between Toronto and Los Angeles,” Boland has a thespian’s eye for dramatic moments, and she makes the most of them in each of Heart’s ten character studies.
In “Tragic Hero,” Rich, a middle-aged small-town hack, befriends Maggy, a lonely teenager in need, he assumes, of protection, but the relationship quickly goes south when he takes one liberty too many. “Swelter,” voiced by seventeen-year-old Louise, describes the aftershocks of the death of Colin, a central member of her high school clique. Another story, “Monster,” exposes the hidden psychopathy of an ordinary-seeming woman on the eve of her wedding.
Boland has a natural gift for voice and her characters often feel believable. They keep to themselves, and their best thoughts are afterthoughts they’d never think to speak aloud. When her stories are at their most spare, they are most effective.
Perhaps the most successful story in the collection is “Mama.” Its narrator, Cheryl-Lee, is heavily-tattooed and, at twenty-six, already hardened by the world—specifically, an abusive childhood and futureless affair with a married man. At the opening of the story, she receives word that her estranged mother has died, and travels to her hometown to sort through the detritus of her mother’s life.
In one passage, Cheryl-Lee, looking at a photograph of her deceased parent, is forced to acknowledge her physical resemblance to a mother from whom even death hasn’t given her enough distance: “We smile the same way. Our eyes are the same shape. Her face is round like mine. We sit the same, straight-backed and never comfortable. A pain I inherited and now wear as my own.”
The ending of “Mama” is satisfying, its key themes circling back in the story: Cheryl-Lee begins the tale lying in bed and ends it lying in bed, and the character development she’s undergone in thirty pages is slight but real enough to ring true.
Significant problems plague the collection as a whole, however. The general feel of naiveté that runs throughout Heart isn’t problematic in and of itself, but it is a factor in the failure of these stories to launch past their adolescent preoccupations. Lines and even titles seem borrowed from indie rock hits (“Forever Ago,” for instance, begins with the line, “To Marianne, forever ago”—lovers of Hipster darling Bon Iver will know where this is headed), and the core themes of the collection—love and sex, gained and lost—feel like an approximation of edginess, not the real thing.
In “Marianne,” for instance, the unnamed narrator bemoans the loss of his ex-girlfriend Marianne in tones that can only be described as cloying:
When Amy smiles at me, the morning light hitting her face, having left some in shadow, I see you lying next to me. There is something about her expression, the sadness under her skin… Amy falls asleep in my arms when I’m drunk and I drift into the arms of elsewhere. Elsewhere holds me.
Many of the collection’s characters seem particularly prone to infatuation, which, when it fails them, morphs into navel-gazing couched in clichés:
I don’t know how to behave between these walls anymore. I see visions dancing in front of me of how I used to be, but I don’t know her anymore. I watch the memories of her move around like I would watch a movie, with a separation and a detachment.
Even “Saturday,” narrated in the voice of an elderly woman dealing with her husband’s terminal cancer, fails to tap the rich vein of images and ideas that should accompany any life fully lived. Meryl’s most vivid memory of her relationship with Joe is of them having sex:
When they were young, the space between them was so charged that it took every part of Meryl to fight what her insides wanted… Looking at him made her drunk. She was not used to feeling so out of control. When his body was pressed against hers, she felt both empty and full.
Passages like these add energy and spice—Boland does have the ability to push boundaries and expose just enough skin in her sex scenes, drawing back before the reader wants to look away—but it is difficult to see what else they contribute. Despite their bravado, the human connections in Heart skirt the superficial, occasionally roaming dangerously close to sheer silliness.
There are unique aspects to the book that deserve mention. Each story’s first page is offset with a simple black and white photograph, taken by Boland herself, which offers an interesting visual support to the story. Spare and often funny, the photographs could have provided ample material for more appropriate cover art for Heart. A lightweight paperback, the book’s cover depicts the silhouette of a bed on a plain blue background, with the title floating in a heart-bedecked doodle—overall, a design which does nothing to distance Heart from Boland’s own youthfulness or lend the stories the gravitas they strive for.
The collection is not improved by the fact that numerous typos are scattered across its pages. The overall effect is that of a very promising first or second draft—worth reading, but unfinished, and ultimately vaguely unsatisfying.
Brindle & Glass | 240 pages | $19.95 | paper | ISBN #978-1926972930