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68
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
55/100Critics
81/100Scholars
Author:
Dorothy Gallagher
Publisher:
New York Review Books
Date:
November 10, 2020
Gallagher moves freely and intuitively between the present and the past to evoke the life she and editor Ben Gallagher made together, and her life after his death, alone and yet at the same time never without thoughts of him, in a present that is haunted but also comforted by the recollection of their common past.
What The Reviewers Say
Its style, as I noted years ago, is 'darting, anecdotal, slightly bemused, possessing a lilting irony that makes for compulsive readability. There is also something funny, sexy or shocking on every page.'.
Stories is a memoir built of anecdote and digression, paragraphs skipping like stones from one liquid moment to the next. The method is gestural, not comprehensive, and the book clocks in at a slight 94 pages. Gallagher works in swift, fizzing movements; each chapter is a sketch, not a painting. Mockingbirds build a nest on her terrace in a few brief lines and are dispatched (by a hawk, alas) at paragraph’s end. When they return later in a single tangential sentence, the moment is as light as a stray mark, the smudge that makes the picture whole.
A memoirist writes to her husband to update him on her life since his death.
