First of all, I just found this totally rad display of Julie Orringer’s writing notebooks. It’s beyond rad.
Second of all, I finished reading Ms. Orringer’s How to Breathe Underwater last night. It’s a stunning, beautiful collection of short stories. So utterly fantastic that it makes me sad that so many people don’t read short story collections, because they are missing out on something so truly wonderful. I raved on about the story “The Smoothest Way is Full of Stones” from The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2004 and that’s just a hint of the beauty to be found in this book.
It was tough reading it. I really wanted to NOT like it. I kept looking in the back at the author photo, a beautiful 32-year-old married to the super-talented Ryan Harty author of the equally fantastic Bring Me Your Saddest Arizona. I just didn’t think it was fair that someone could be beautiful and so talented. I didn’t want to believe that someone who looked like that and was married to someone so talented could have the depth to write stories that would move me. There’s a part of me that wants to believe all writers are frumpy, unhappy, bitter, angry, unattractive beings.
Despite my best intentions, Orringer won me over, and how. The stories in How to Breathe Underwater are so packed full of goodness that each one feels almost like a mini-novel. . . but they’re not, because they are short stories. Short stories where it seems not a single word is wasted. It’s an amazing feat.
Orringer hits you right away with a story of young Ella and Ben whose mom has cancer (sick and/or dead moms are featured a lot). Their parents take them to a weird cancer cult house for Thanksgiving. What follows is a tragic story about coping with death. Then Orringer takes it up another notch with “When She is Old and I am Famous” about a fat artist and her supermodel cousin. Then when you think it can’t get any better, there’s “The Isabel Fish.” The story of 14-year-old Maddy who has just been through a terrible car accident, an accident that leaves Maddy’s brother’s girlfriend dead. The accident involved the car being submerged in a pond. We watch the sibling’s relationship disintegrate as they take scuba diving lessons. Yeah. It’s astounding.
You’d think after those three she’d let you rest throwing a dud in the bunch, but no. No, she’s just getting started because then you get hit with “Note to Sixth-Grade Self” a story of a nerdy 12 yearcold told in the second person. The second person! That’s so hard to do and to do well, yet Orringer pulls it off. It might be a story that only appeals to women, I’m not sure. But it broke my heart right in two. Then she follows it up with the aforementioned smoothest way story.
Finally, she lets us down a little with the not-bad by any stretch of the imagination, but not as good as the rest “Care” and “Stars of Motown Shining Bright.”
Finally, finally she finishes us off with “What We Save” another daughter dealing with mom’s cancer story and the utterly fabulous “Stations of the Cross” about a young jewish girl growing up in some backwoods parish of Louisiana in 1973.
This book is so damn good that it’s almost frustrating that once you finish it, that’s all you get. She has no other books out at the moment. So you’ll just have to content yourself with this little taste of goodness to come. Read this book. Really. If you’re looking for something to rock your socks and move you more than you thought words could, this is it.