Don’t expect a collection of neutral-toned, het- norm Prairie coming-of-age stories here. Chandra Mayor’s All the Pretty Girls is decorated with dirty carpets, dusty stairwells, empty whiskey bottles and shitty diapers. And don’t be fooled by the cover. These stories will not fulfill any retro fantasies for full-figured young women frolicking unaccountably in the waves wearing sturdy-yet-sexy undergarments. These are the stories of young women who buy their underwear at the Salvation Army thrift shop and feed their children food-bank cereal, women who have bad relationships with men and, often, questionable ones with women.
I want to say that these stories are about survival, but that seems trite. These 10 first- person narratives pull the sheets off the windows to reveal the lives of women who are trying to make a go of it, but are not quite equipped to do more than scrape by. Mayor doesn’t gussy up these stories to make it easy for the reader. Her language is generally sparse, the dialogue naturalist and sometimes bleak.
In its simplicity, this language renders some perfect sentences, like the following from “Parquet”: “None of us had ever been hit with a belt, and the thought of it struck terror deep into our tiny sticky hearts.” The poetry in Mayor’s language is found in shrapnel words that stay lodged under your skin long after you’ve finished the book.
Mayor frequently resists the typical narrative arc of the short story in order to reflect on moments, feelings and interactions, rather than getting from A to B in plot points. Several stories read like vignettes— sometimes, they don’t go anywhere; they stop at the pictures Mayor wants you to see, and she makes you look hard at them. Her characters share the unrelenting quotidian details of trying to make do on not enough, and often it’s everything but pretty. It’s these characters who share quiet moments of connection and happiness that keep you turning the pages, hoping with them for something better around the corner.
Mayor finds some hope in relationships between women, although she is careful not to idealize these friendships and romances. Being a homo doesn’t save you from the train wreck of life here. In fact, perhaps the greatest strength of All the Pretty Girls is that, like its characters, readers don’t have an easy way out.
T.L. Cowan was a pretty girl but suspects that her looks are fading. When not staring into the mirror, she works on her Ph.D. dissertation and writes smutty stories for performance.
