Intimacies
Intimacies by Lucy Caldwell is one of our fiction recommendations for July and is available for purchase on the Seaside Books online shop. Born in Belfast, Lucy Caldwell is the multi-award-winning author of three novels, several stage plays and radio dramas, and, most recently, two collections of short stories: Multitudes (Faber, 2016) and Intimacies (forthcoming, Faber, 2020). She is also the editor of Being Various: New Irish Short Stories (Faber, 2019). Awards include the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, the George Devine Award, the Dylan Thomas Prize, the Imison Award, the Susan Smith Blackburn Award, the Irish Writers’ and Screenwriters’ Guild Award, the Commonwealth Writers’ Award (Canada & Europe), the Edge Hill Short Story Prize Readers’ Choice Award, a Fiction Uncovered Award, a K. Blundell Trust Award and a Major Individual Artist Award from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland. She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2018.
As I always say, when writing about a book I think it is helpful to include the blurb as this is what folks might first read if they picked up this book in a bookshop. We are told:
Intimacies exquisitely charts the steps and missteps of young women trying to find their place in the world. From a Belfast student ordering illegal drugs online to end an unwanted pregnancy to a young mother's brush with mortality; from a Christmas Eve walking the city centre streets when everything seems possible, to a night flight from Canada which could change a life irrevocably, these are stories of love, loss and exile, of new beginnings and lives lived away from 'home'.
Taking in, too, the lives of other women who could be guiding lights - from Monica Lewinsky to Caroline Norton to Sinead O'Connor - Intimacies offers keenly felt and subtly revealing insights into the heartbreak and hope of modern life.
Short stories are my favorite books to read in the summer. I find that having something I can pop in and out of works best for long days spent outside, trying to keep an 8-year-old entertained. These stories were subtle and quiet but very impactful. I found myself thinking about them days later. Usually, in a short story collection, there will be one or two stories that I don’t enjoy as much or that don’t seem to suit the collection overall, but this was not the case with Intimacies. I love when an author is able to take small moments or actions and expand them outward, displaying the layers of meaning within, and Caldwell does that expertly in Intimacies.
Each story centers around an unnamed female protagonist dealing with the complexities of day-to-day life. Not knowing the character’s names gives the stories a universal quality. The characters feel familiar and at times I felt like it could have been me or one of my friends. Despite being unnamed, each character has a distinct voice and each story deals with situations that many women may and are facing on a day-to-day basis. Caldwell doesn’t shy away from topics such as miscarriage, abortion, sexuality, or grief.
Two of my favorites in the collection were Mayday and Jars of Clay, both dealing with abortion access in Ireland. In Mayday, we follow a young woman who has ordered abortion medication over the internet and is self-managing her abortion at home. I loved the subtleness of this story. It never felt preachy but instead showed the everydayness of the character’s experience and the inner dialogue of someone who just isn’t prepared to become a parent. We see her grappling with the social messages that abortion is sinful and those who have one are destined for hell, but we also see her overcome these thoughts by turning inward and acknowledging that she knows what is right for her body and her life. It avoids drama in favor of honesty, and I think we need more writing to approach abortion access in this way.
Jars of Clay similarly deals with abortion access through the eyes of a young, American girl who has traveled with her church’s youth group to Ireland to campaign against the referendum that would legalize abortion in the country. I worked as a reproductive health and abortion access advocate for many years before I moved to Ireland, and I am all too familiar with the ways that anti-abortion organizations and evangelical churches indoctrinate young people and train them to hold conversations with abortion-rights activists. Make no mistake, on a light day these groups practice a language of shame and manipulation that can emotionally hurt someone who has had an abortion or is considering one, on a bad day they are violent. Caldwell was able to humanize the main character, letting us see how a young person could come to believe extremist propaganda and how it can color their experience of life. We feel for this girl and hope that one small interaction with a woman on the streets of Dublin could be enough to make her question the motivations of the leaders and adults around her.
I also really enjoyed Words for Things and The Children which similarly take on a big topic and wrap it up in day-to-day moments. This works to ground the issues in the present, rather than letting them float loftily across news reports and headlines. Words for Things does this excellently by relating the modern experience of motherhood to the celebrity women or public figures that we misunderstood and treated poorly, like Monica Lewinsky, Anna Nicole Smith, or Britney Spears. The Children reaches forward and back to link the efforts of Caroline Norton to reform child custody laws to the Trump administration’s detention of immigrant children. This is done with such skill that we can easily see how these threads tie together.
If you are looking for an accessible short story collection for days on the beach or in the garden, I would highly recommend Intimacies. If you have read this book, I would love to know what you think over on our social media pages.
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