UMass Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press

Stories

Michelle Richmond

Winner of the AWP Award for Short Fiction

Powerful stories explore the lives of a fragmented family from Alabama

Four sisters, many lovers, and a series of settings both familiar and exotic delineate the nineteen linked stories in this award-winning debut collection. Whether leaving, returning, or staying put, the women who narrate these stories are bound to Alabama by history and habit, their voices informed by the landscape and lore of the New South.

Michelle Richmond introduces us to a memorable extended family, in which lies come more easily than forgiveness, and parents and siblings conceal the truth as often as they reveal it. In many cases, the women are forced to choose—between family and lovers, safety and self-sufficiency, the religion they grew up with and the reality of the world they have found for themselves.

In "Down the Shore Everything's All Right," twenty-eight-year-old Grace abandons wide Southern beaches for New York sidewalks, only to discover that the Gulf Coast still has a hold on her. In "Intermittent Waves of Unusual Size and Force," a wayward father is called home from California by a massive hurricane that threatens the lives of his family. In "The World's Greatest Pants," three younger sisters watch in awe as Darlene, the eldest and bravest, defies her parents and heads for Texas in a battered El Camino.

An undercurrent of eroticism runs through the collection. "Propaganda" finds the youngest sister alone in an old house in Knoxville, where she forms a symbiotic relationship with a mysterious upstairs neighbor during her husband's lengthy absence. In "Fifth Grade: A Criminal History," adolescence and sexuality merge with explosive consequences. A woman dancing naked on a bridge in San Francisco is the central figure of the title story.

The divine and the absurd are uneasy but frequent bedfellows in this volume. "O-lama-lama" portrays the scene of a religious free-for-all at a beachside church in Fairhope, Alabama, while "Slacabamorinico" celebrates the holy commotion of Mardi Gras at a Mobile cemetery. In "The Last Bad Thing," a love-struck young woman in the Bible Belt is haunted by visions of Ramadan.

"Richmond's 19 charming and accessible short stories, ranging from a punchy single page to a complex 20 pages in length, make up a short-story cycle that revolves primarily around a single family. Presented in a varied and staggered pattern through the points of view of three daughters, the stories recount the family's growth, trials, and tribulations in an almost Joycean, interlocking, family-epic manner: birth and motherhood; religion and education; pain, disease, and death; homosexuality and the splintering of the family. The final effect of this collection of stories is like the feeling of a rising crescendo that one gets from reading a complex contemporary novel...An excellent read, this well-written and thoroughly fascinating short-story cycle is recommended for public libraries and for all academic collections supporting the study of fiction writing."

Choice
"This collection of brief sketches alternating with longer fictions hasn't the structure of a novel; but it has a novel's heft, as characters who are just names in one story emerge to take center stage in another. These women's lives are shaped by fate and by place, forces hauntingly evoked by this talented young writer."

Boston Globe
The stories in Michelle Richmond's first collection spin artfully off the life of a single character...smart and adept..."

The New York Times
"Richmond's writing is perceptive and heartfelt, her subjects at once edgy and familiar. This is a winning debut."

Publishers Weekly
"The Girl in the Fall-Away Dress is a stunning collection filled with heart-stopping moments of such raw emotion that I am left with a vivid array of visions long remembered afterward. There is humor, there is grief—the author skillfully keeping us in that precious spot between the two, so that we are always aware of the fragile filaments linking one experience to another."

Jill McCorkle

Michelle Richmond grew up in Alabama. She lives in San Francisco, where she teaches writing. Richmond has been a finalist for both the Bakeless Prize and the Willa Cather Fiction Prize. She received a B. A. from the University of Alabama (1992) and an M. F. A. from the University of Miami (1998). Richmond has received fellowships from the James Michener Foundation, the Constance Saltonstall Foundation, and the Millay Colony for the Arts.

See also:
Table of Contents

Visit Michelle Richmond's website.

Associated Writing Programs

Fiction
160 pp.
$27.50t cloth, ISBN 1-55849-315-8
November 2001

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