What You've Been Missing

by Janet Desaulniers

Overview

Populated by characters as frank as their midwestern settings, What You’ve Been Missing, Janet Desaulniers’s debut collection, explores the unsettling moments when ordinary life ceases to exist. Parents, confused by their five-year-old’s refusal to sit up in her chair, lift her blouse to find she’s been beaten. A woman returns from a shopping trip just in time to see her husband kissing a young co-worker. A young husband constructs an elaborate and romanticized version of his new marriage and then ruins it in one gesture. These singular moments propel each person on a journey beyond the realm of everyday existence.

Vividly portraying the possible horrors and detours that can mark anyone’s life, Desaulniers beautifully captures the vast and often conflicting emotions that humans endure at times of loss and sorrow—loneliness, pain, desperation, desire. Yet this balletic push and pull of emotions will challenge, wound, and ultimately enlighten her characters, transporting them to a place beyond individual sorrow.

At times unbearably heartbreaking, What You’ve Been Missing is not just another set of stories about bad things happening to good people. At its heart, this award-winning collection is about people continuing to talk—rather than shutting down—as bad things happen to them. As the recently divorced Liza thinks in “The Good Fight”: “Words do ease us. They comfort us. Maybe they protect us in a way, rescue us from the agony of what our bodies feel.”

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781587295133
Publisher:	University of Iowa Press
Publication date:	10/01/2004
Series:	John Simmons Short Fiction Award Series
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	140
File size:	364 KB

About the Author

Janet Desaulniers is the recipient of literary fellowships from the James A. Michener/Copernicus Society, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Illinois Arts Council, along with a Pushcart Prize and a Transatlantic Review award for fiction. Her work has appeared in numerous literary publications, including the New Yorker, TriQuarterly, the North American Review, and Ploughshares. She currently teaches in the MFA in Writing Program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and lives in Evanston.

Table of Contents

Contents Where We All Should Have Been The Good Fight Everyone Is Wearing a Hat Real Love The Next Day Mothers without Children Roll Never, Ever, Always After Rosa Parks Who Knows More Than You

Editorial Reviews

"Hope and regret, child. You seem to be making a home for yourself exactly in between," says a young bar regular in this delicately rendered debut collection about the emotional consequences of loss. Other characters are caught in that balance as well: daughters trying on different versions of themselves after their father's death; a boy grappling with his parents' joint-custody divorce; a na ve young woman discovering her husband and his co-worker mid-kiss. The stories, set in modern-day Midwestern towns, are told in uncomplicated but elegant language and a graceful, even tone. Realistic dialogue and poignant introspection portray grief as multilayered-confusing, exhausting and inspiring. Desaulniers slips up only occasionally in characterization; a young girl awaiting her mother's next departure, for example, is too thin and vague a figure to embody the nuances of an abandoned childhood. But when Desaulniers is good, she's excellent, as in the gripping "The Next Day," in which thoughtful Tucker says of his wife's late-night storytelling: "She tells me these stories because she trusts me to love her more than she loves herself. This is how people merge, I think." Moments such as these distinguish the collection: simple enough to be recognizable yet unusual enough to be remarkable. Agent, Alexis Hurley. (Oct.) Forecast: Winner of the John Simmons Short Fiction Award, this collection can be confidently recommended to any fan of short stories. Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

Ten remarkably accomplished stories explore the painful rips in life's fabric. Three of the strongest pieces appeared in The New Yorker. "Where We All Should Have Been" arrives at a subtle, complicated ending after a woman is called back to Kansas City by her recently widowed mother to help with her defiant 16-year-old sister, who's getting in over her head with booze and men. In "The Good Fight," Liza, whose husband is divorcing her for his 20-year-old Japanese student, sits in a Chicago bar with an old friend who's in love with a 20-year-old himself; Liza discovers the line between words and touch ("It was true; his touch did ease her . . . . Maybe that was what terror would teach her, that the language of feeling was unspoken, a language of gesture, of limbs and organs"), and in "Everyone Is Wearing a Hat," a couple's eight-year-old son has been killed in a hit-and-run accident. The mother's grief is expressed in poignant and poetic language: "That is what I had wanted to mourn-the loss of his touch, his weight, the small light bones that had grown and passed through my own body." In the sketchier "Mothers Without Children," women whose children have been stolen by their ex-husbands share horror stories. The power of sibling bonds lies at the heart of "After Rosa Parks," about a Vietnam-era veteran who provides support for his sister-a single mother-and his kindergarten-age nephew; and at the heart of "Who Knows More Than You," where an older sister is a phone confidante for Bette, who discovers that her five-year-old daughter has been beaten by her babysitter. (" 'Twenty-five years I spent on red alert before I relaxed,' Bette said. 'Always certain the worst could happen. And I getblindsided by a woman named Penny.' "). A sensitive, haunting debut collection. Winner of the John Simmons Short Fiction Award. (Also see Feitell, below.)

Kirkus Reviews