I believe that I discovered the true magic of short stories under somewhat untraditional circumstances. Seated at the table during Christmas dinner, my Uncle Steve announced to our family that he would be reading a story aloud. This story was David Sedaris’s “Seasons Greetings to Our Friends and Family!.” Although yes, the story revolves around an annual Christmas letter from a fictional family called the Dunbars, deeming it a somewhat appropriate read for Christmas Day dinner, the contents of the story stray far from the holiday spirit.
That night, my whole family (ranging from my eleven year old self to my elderly grandparents) were subjected to the shocking contents of the Dunbars’ family drama. This drama, if you were curious, was mostly centered around mother Jocelyn Dunbar’s disdain for her husband’s illegitimate twenty-two year old daughter Khe Sahn, of whom he had fathered while fighting in Vietnam.
Hearing of Khe Sahn’s troubling, incestuously inclined nature, her murderous capabilities (that resulted in the death of the only Dunbar grandchild via a washing machine incident) and her apparent likeness to a half-dressed child prostitute, were baffling yet intriguing things to hear about at my young age.
Although yes, that night is memorable to me because of the magic of Khe Sahn, the rest of the Dunbar clan, and their respectively concerning morals, what stuck with me the most, was my love for David Sedaris, ultimately leading to my passion for short stories.
After mowing through Sedaris’s collections (don’t worry — not at age eleven), I found myself looking for more. Then, in a divine intervention, I discovered Eve Babitz. Eve’s stories are electric, glamorous, and just vain enough to capture the heart of a snarky sixteen-year-old girl obsessed with daydreaming, clothing, music, and seventies Hollywood nostalgia.
Tearing through Babitz’s stories like I had with David Sedaris, at some point, I stopped to wonder why I moved through story collections with ease, but sweat at the thought of having to finish an entire book. It’s not that I couldn’t read a book. I can, and I have, but I came to realize that short stories are able to provide experiences that books sometimes can’t.
Aside from the obvious — they are not providing us with the same physical length — I’ve found that a short story’s power comes quite literally from its brevity. Short stories can still be flowery like novels, they can still exist in opulent worlds like Babitz’s, and they can work with just as complex emotions and dramas. In fact, I believe that what they lack in span, they make up for in double the punch. Although I don’t intend to knock the many extensive yet masterful works of literature that exist in the world, I do think in some cases, the idea that less is more can ring true.
In short pieces, such as “Sexy,” from Jhumpa Lahiri’s collection Interpreter of Maladies, the story of a younger woman’s affair is told plainly but beautifully, weaving in themes of self-worth, desperation, and fragility, in a mere couple thousand words. Part of what makes this story beautiful is its raw brevity. While Lahiri develops her fictional worlds and their characters very well, she does not over explain them — she hasn’t the space or interest. This leaves us as the readers to absorb the events and the resolve of the piece in a short amount of time, leading to stronger emotional impact.
Aside from the satisfying bluntness we receive through these pieces, short stories can also do wonders for the busy people of the world. As a college student, specifically someone deeply entrenched in the world of liberal arts, the last thing I often want to do is lay down on the couch after a long day of classes, and delve into a four-hundred-page book. However, as this same liberal arts student, this often shames me. I’ve sat before and wondered why, if I chose to devote myself to words, do I not want to give them the same attention in my free time?
I’ve felt at times like a fraud because of this, consumed by a pressure to attend to books in my personal life the same way I do in my studies. It was only when I continued to pick up short stories, well into the second year of my college career, that I realized these critiques were unfair to myself.
I realized that I’ve likely spent just as much time reading short stories casually as I would have full novels. Short stories provide a liberation that it’s hard to feel reading whole books. If books are exhausting (but still rewarding) marathons, then short stories are exhilarating sprints, not burdened by the same weight of commitment, but still beholden to the same passion and intensity. As the reader, you still gain the thrilling experience of transporting yourself to a different universe, but also a convenience not offered to you with novels and entire books.
With less need for commitment, I’ve found myself becoming more open-minded. While there are certain topics I likely wouldn’t care to devote hours or days of my time to reading about, spending time reading ten or twenty pages about a topic so far from my usual world is not only easy, but often alluring. Reading “One Holy Night” by Sandra Cisneros, from her book collection, Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories, provided me this very experience.
Although it wouldn’t be typical for me to opt for a story recounting the life of a taken-advantage-of girl and her thirty-seven year old serial killer “lover,” if I hadn’t taken a chance, I would never know the beauty of Cisneros’s prose. I would never have turned to the next chapter, and found “My Tocaya,” or given the rest of the collection a go.
Not only do short stories open your world, leading you down new and exciting paths you could’ve never thought of, but they can fulfill you just as well as any other medium can. Giving these stories the time of day, and some of my late nights, has reintroduced to me the love of reading for leisure, and has made me realize that if I want to bring words to all corners of my life, I can.
This is no pressure to the reader to find your immediate or preferred niche. Khe Sahn and the rest of the awful Dunbars came to me in a delightful moment of chance, as did the rest of my literary loves. The beauty of these short stories, is that they give you the time and space to take a chance.