Whose World is This
Lee Montgomery Lee Montgomery’s short-story collection, Whose World Is This?, alights on all the big issues—death, love, sex, drug addiction and friendship—with a clear, original voice. The stories are at once crushing and funny. Montgomery examines the interior lives of eight women and how they cope with heart-breaking moments yet still keep their sense of humor. “Don’t hate me because I have cancer,” Christopher tells his friend: Now that he’s on chemo, he can eat what he wants and not get fat. Misha, a newscaster who gets fired for crying on air, develops a condition she calls “Compassion Complexica Nervosa”: It manifests as rashes all over her body, in the shapes of countries where tragedies have occurred. “Misha had Haiti on her ankle, New Jersey under an eye, Laos migrating across her chest and on her belly, and Los Angeles behind her ear,” Montgomery writes. In the story “Arts and Crafts of American WASPS,” a young woman who lives in a world much different than her mother’s receives a huge package of things from her past. Among them, says Michelle, the narrator, are “kerchiefs and sweaters, woolen scarves and hats, books by Emily Post and Amy Vanderbilt, knitting and needlepoint bags full of my grandmother’s half-finished embroidery. . . . I am my mother and we are sleeping. I climb into her and float.” Lee Montgomery, who lives in Portland, has written this collection of touching stories with heart and grace. These are pieces that cut deeply but then administer the salve. Montgomery is also the author of The Things Between Us, a memoir of her childhood in the Boston area with a flamboyant mother who drinks gin each morning. She is the editorial director at Tin House Books and has a Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of Iowa. Whose World Is This? is a winner of the John Simmons Short Fiction Award. |