RACHEL SOO THOW - 28 FEB 2022

Hands up if the title of this novel got your attention.

Fragile, raw, chaotic, euphoric, and uncompromising, this exceptional debut collection of short stories from Saba Sams is perhaps one of the punchiest and dynamic I’ve ever come across. Sams’ characters seem to seek solitude and independence in a world that is intent on testing out the waters of adulthood, misleading relationships, and exploitative hierarchies. 

This exceptional collection is the brainchild of 25-year-old Saba Sams and I must say, this is an incredible one at that - Sams writing has been featured in The Manchester Review, The Stinging Fly and Granta to name a few, and Sams’ story ‘Tinderloin’ (one of my favourites) was shortlisted for the 2019 White Review Short Story Prize. In ‘Tinderloin’, the protagonist has a miscarriage and develops a somewhat all-encompassing relationship dripping in devotion to her boyfriend’s dog - “The barks kept coming. She could hear me. I started to cry again. I could almost feel her tongue, rough and wet on my hands…  I knew that I would never see him again after this, and I didn’t care.” The writing in this story excelled in testing the waters of an already crumbling relationship only to have the powers that be, do a complete 360 with each page.

In ‘Send Nudes’, our protagonist is subjected to the delicate and drifting exploration of the body and the power of an anonymous other that delights in exploiting the emotional treatise before asking for nudes - “He was a listener, she was sure, and a listener was hard to find. The biggest giveaway, of course, was the photograph he’d sent. It sounded stupid, but it was true: she could see his nature in his big toe. How honest it looked, how normal, and yet how intimate.” With such originality and raw prose, this novel conveys the suffocation and disillusionment that goes hand in hand with our place in the digital age - amongst the backdrop of countless dating apps and succumbing to societal pressures, young women are at the beck and call of what represents normality. To fit into the mould is to become prey to this pressure and in the end, the result is toxic, and we become complicit in our own contradictions and vulnerability. We give in:

“Whenever she closes her eyes and imagines her body, it expands and constricts to the beat of a pulse, moving between very thin, thinner than she has ever been or could be, and then very fat, fatter than those Americans on television, so fat she would have to be lifted from bed by a crane. In turn, she avoids looking directly at her body. She probably would not be able to see it as it is. If she did see it as it is, that could be worse.”

You could say that Sams’ tender prose is similar to that of Ottessa Moshfegh - dark, humorous, feral and vulnerable, yet unlike Moshfegh’s characters that are thrust into jaded complexities, Sams’ characters are strong and resilient against each new experience and traumas become just a small dot on a journey towards learning to truly live in your own body. Subjects such as sexual assault and miscarriage are handled with such sensitivity yet honesty that the effect may often be misconstrued as ‘blasé’ but this is anything but – each story is interwoven into the ordinary and is often birthed from the observations of Sams’ blunt characters, so they are almost stories that embrace versus stereotype. Piercing imagery and role reversals support these psychological insights which makes for a great read that will leave you feeling liberated and educated. From pregnancy to seduction, to ambivalent families to abortion, this novel covers it all with gut-wrenching observation - Sams’ stories are traumatic and are sure to leave a mark but also a glimmer of hope that bouncing back is always part of our story.

Thank you to @bloomsburypublishing for the gifted review copy- available at your local bookstore (AU$29.99 / NZ$32.99).