Our desires are driven as much by our needs as our fears. And female desire — of which much has been written and much of it badly or incorrectly — is often still about suppressed needs and unarticulated fears. Danielle Lazarin's debut short story collection, Back Talk, deals with just such desires, needs, and fears with a cast of young girls and women at various stages of their lives. While the desires are varied, ranging from needs for intimacy to independence, the fear that over-rides all other fears is that of loss. This makes their conflicts deeply personal and their choices, though they do affect others, are mostly like self-inflicted, long-lasting wounds.
 [Full review link to be added when it is published shortly.]

Danielle Lazarin’s <i>Back Talk</i> consists of sixteen short stories, four of which are short short stories, slightly longer than sketches. The sixteen stories focus on women undergoing transitions from their early teens through, presumably, their mid-thirties. Transitions? Yes, transitions of geography; of friendships; of partnerships, marriages, and romances; and of relationships with siblings and parents. I’ll leave it to the literary prize jurors, some of whom undoubtedly will be weighing <i>Back Talk</i> in their 2018 deliberations, to decide whether or not these are linked short stories; to me, they are no less linked than David Szalay’s <i>All That Man Is</i>, shortlisted for the Booker in 2016.

At her best, Lazarin is pitch perfect in depicting individual moments that define relationships. Here’s the main character in “Floor Plans” discussing her friends’ reactions to her pending divorce: “They take sides, though we don’t think here are sides to take. Mutual, mutual. The whole world splits.” And in “Spider Legs,” a teenager being driven by her divorced father to the airport to reunite with her mother and older brother and sister in Paris: “’I was thinking, while you’re there, you might as well check out the American university.’ We’ve had this conversation before. “I want to go to school in the States,’ I remind him. . . ‘Well, perhaps it could be on your list. I hear its art history department is quite good.’ ‘That’s Jill, Dad. I like science.’ ‘I know that, Caitlin, but maybe you’ll surprise yourself,’ he snaps at me, but his face is pink with shame.” Or in “Landscape No. 27,” a married woman thinking of her lover: “I saw you thinking about turning around and offering your hand to me, but you knew I wouldn’t take it, and neither of us wanted to say we had gone off course, because it would sound like a bad metaphor and the idea that might be true was too much for either of us to admit.”

Among the most affecting stories is “Weighed and Measured,” which follows Franny and Lucia from the summer of their 14th years until they are 18. They have a tight but tenuous friendship: “Around Lucia’s and Patrick’s mothers Franny understands that what’s between her and Lucia can always be broken, that it will.” Franny and Lucia grow up, move to separate schools, Franny falls in like with Lucia’s upstate cousin. Nothing extraordinary happens in their lives, but Lazarin unfolds adolescence delicately and surely.

“Spider Legs” and “Second-Chance Family” both feature Caitlin and her older siblings, Jill and Jack. Hope, the offspring of her father’s “secondchance family”, babysits for the now domesticate Jill, to her mother’s apparent annoyance and perhaps dismay. Again, nothing extraordinary happens in their lives, but Lazarin nails growth and development and changing people and relationships beautifully.

I usually sample short story collections, reading one or two, then returning weeks or months later to read a third or a fourth. But <i>Back Talk</i> pulled me along like a novel, investing me thoroughly in its young women, learning to understand them more and more.

I would like to thank Penguin Books and NetGalley for making an electronic advanced reader’s copy available to me in exchange for this honest review, and I would also like to thank @pronounced_ing for recommending

I love this collection of short stories about the lives of teens and young women! The writing is beautifully polished, controlled, and evocative, and the content of each story resonates wonderfully. It's a delight to me to now have such a strong and current short story collection to offer my students. I'm hoping Lazarin can help--or even singlehandedly--bring back a golden age of the short story, as we saw in the 1980s. Lazarin's book seems that dazzling and assured to me.