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Sad Grownups<\/em> <\/p>\n The seventeen stories in Amy Stuber\u2019s debut collection, Sad Grownups<\/em>, are filled with moments of beauty, dread, playfulness, and existential probing. With deft prose, Stuber captures these moods within the span of a single paragraph. The stories aim squarely at questioning the ways we live today. As she notes in the interview that follows, the collection\u2019s title is a nod to one of the book\u2019s major themes: how our society has an unfortunate tendency to create sad grownups.<\/p>\n Sad Grownups<\/em> is out now.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n TEGETHOFF:<\/strong> There are a lot of what might be called metafictional elements in these stories. Sometimes they arrive via second person, a \u201cyou\u201d interjected that could be the reader, or possibly the writer herself. In other moments, the narrators seem to step back from the stories completely to comment on their progress. The first story in the collection, \u201cDay Hike,\u201d is a prime example of this, with the narrator letting the reader know that she is writing the story. Could you talk about the craft decisions that go into such moments?<\/p>\n <\/p>\n STUBER:<\/strong> There\u2019s a Bruce Springsteen song phrase from \u201cDancing in the Dark\u201d: \u201cI\u2019m just tired and bored of myself.\u201d That\u2019s pretty much where I was when I started writing these stories. I had taken a break from fiction and done a ton of flash and had to lure myself back into stories by making them really different from what I had been doing. I may look back on them in a few years and think, Oh, god, these are gimmicky, why did I add that?<\/em> But during the time I was writing them, I would finish a standard narrative and think, this needs something else<\/em>, or I\u2019d write a flash and think, this should be expanded and set beside or within another narrative<\/em>.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u201cDay Hike\u201d started as a flash, I think, about a writer feeling jealous of her friend\u2019s life and accomplishments. But I was simultaneously writing another little thing about a couple going on vacation in Colorado, a place I went as a kid and where I still go once a year or so. The seed of that story was seeing a lot of strangers I passed on a hike I took looking miserable, like they\u2019d rather be doing anything other than hiking, and then just thinking about the things we put ourselves through to feel productive and accomplished to ourselves or in the eyes of others. (I love hiking and walking, don\u2019t get me wrong. But I\u2019m increasingly annoyed by productivity culture, and that\u2019s one of the things I think both threads of this story engage with.)<\/p>\n <\/p>\n I did not strategically write a collection with metafictional elements, and I didn\u2019t even realize I had until someone pointed it out to me. I was just trying to push myself with regard to what a story could be or do.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n TEGETHOFF: <\/strong>Related to the first question, these metafictional moments seem to expose the artifice of narrative structure. It\u2019s like you\u2019re asking why these stories should be told in the first place. For instance, there\u2019s this narrative passage from \u201cDead Animals\u201d:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Was everything okay? Was everything going to be okay? Tell me this was pivotal. Tell me it mattered. Tell me Frida would be different and better, with a brain less full of noise and better suited to post-modernity.<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n What do you think these moments add? How do they modify or change a story?<\/p>\n <\/p>\n STUBER:<\/strong> With \u201cDead Animals,\u201d I wrote a fragment of a babysitter story about ten years ago. It was just a woman who was kind of a mess taking care of a kid who didn\u2019t really need care and putting her increasingly in harm\u2019s way. It was about three pages and never worked. I picked it up again in maybe 2019 and saw it from a totally different perspective, saw the woman\u2019s backstory, saw how she was always questioning herself, her life choices, and I wanted to make that questioning piece into something outside the narrative, something that could almost be pulled away from the storyline. I wanted the story, all parts of it, to engage more directly with storytelling as a construct, and I hope doing so makes readers think more about building character and, ultimately, building self.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Generally, adding these other moments and elements is, I guess, somewhat for texture too: a break, a kind of chorus, something to distract or defuse for a second.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n TEGETHOFF:<\/strong> Most of the women in these stories feel guarded but also seek some sort of validation for their existence. There\u2019s Sage in \u201cThe Game,\u201d for instance, who puts a piece of masking tape on her forehead to see if her husband or sons will notice, but they don\u2019t. Elsewhere, men are more sinister, and the women seem creeped out or exhausted by their presence. Multiple women in Sad Grownups <\/em>say they prefer the company of women over men. Could you talk about the world the women in this collection inhabit?<\/p>\n <\/p>\n STUBER:<\/strong> Oh god. This is probably, embarrassingly, the story of my life, feeling guarded but seeking validation: The Introverted Attention Seeker<\/em>, a memoir.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n But with regard to the book, I think there\u2019s a continuum here, from women who have decided to simply surround themselves with other women as a preference but also as protection (the mother in \u201cPeople\u2019s Parties\u201d), to women who want men in their lives, and enjoy their company, but also feel frustrated by the behaviors of the men they interact with and with some of the manifestations of maleness in America (like Sage in \u201cThe Game\u201d).<\/p>\n <\/p>\n I think women have to be on guard. This country is often inhospitable to people who identify as women. Women are constantly being assessed in ways men rarely are for their performance and attitude and appearance, their moods monitored and commented on. We\u2019re denied medical care and access. There are so many physical safety things women think about as a default that a lot of men rarely have to think about. But then we\u2019re also often trained to seek validation\u2014it\u2019s a bad conundrum. So it\u2019s just a reality that filtered into many of these stories.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n I\u2019m fifty-five and feel increasingly loosened from needing to care about men\u2019s approval or disapproval, which is liberating, but that doesn\u2019t change the fact that as a woman, I have less power and fewer rights.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n TEGETHOFF: <\/strong>Many of the men in this collection are unpleasant. This characterization might go double for Adam Zanger, the protagonist of the final story, \u201cThe Last Summer.\u201d Adam is a poetry professor\u2014and not very good at poetry or teaching, from what I can tell\u2014who has found out he\u2019s dying. He\u2019s lonely, perhaps angry he hasn\u2019t accomplished more in his life. But we see some redemptive qualities in him, mainly as he learns about himself via two sorority girls. How does this story play off the others in the collection, especially in its depiction of men?<\/p>\n <\/p>\n STUBER:<\/strong> Two-part answer. First, I think there are maybe two tiers of men in these stories. Some of the main characters who are men are a pretty equal mix of good and bad, which I think all people are, like the Adam Zanger character, who is a little isolated and maybe a little misanthropic, but who also sees beauty in poetry and the world and worries about things and wants things. Also like the main characters in the title story and the main character in \u201cDick Cheney Was Not My Father.\u201d All kinds of fucked up people, but hopefully nuanced and with some, as you said, redemptive qualities.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n But second part: Yes, a lot of the antagonists in the stories are men. I’ll be honest and say that while I\u2019ve grown up with pretty solidly remarkable men in my family of origin and my current family, I have had a lot of negative experiences with men, ranging from assault to abuse, plus the more insidious sexism that infiltrates daily activities. I think that a number of our current ills can be connected to a kind of hyper-masculinity that\u2019s infused our society and that is concerned more with greed and power than with taking care.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n I realize that\u2019s a generalization. There are a lot of women who\u2019ve done or do terrible things. I\u2019m extremely imperfect and have done my own bad things, so I\u2019m not setting myself apart from this in any way. But I do think our country needs a shift away from an obsession with strength and toward a concern with caring for people and places and communities. Deemphasizing masculinity is one important way to do this\u2014raising all children to have empathy and express emotion instead of encouraging some kind of inhuman toughness. I think the story \u201cThe Game\u201d tries to engage with this, and same for the \u201cDick Cheney\u201d story. This ties back, for me, to what I see as one of the book\u2019s big themes: that American society, as it is now, is kind of set up to create sad grownups. It\u2019s depressing, I realize, and hopefully I\u2019m wrong.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n TEGETHOFF: <\/strong>The climate crisis shows up throughout this collection. Characters are blunt about their anxieties and often fairly pessimistic about humanity\u2019s chances. How did you approach this very real emergency we\u2019re living in? Did you feel it was important to be direct about the crisis?<\/p>\n <\/p>\n I have two teenagers. I see how kids carry the weight of this. Some people might say, \u201cWell, every generation has its issues,\u201d but I don\u2019t think every generation\u2019s issue is so unflinchingly dire. Yes, growing up with the threat of nuclear war was scary, but I think it was somehow less pervasive or maybe easier to compartmentalize. I definitely thought at times about war potentially happening when I was a kid, and I know that brought its own umbrella of fear. Climate crisis feels different. It\u2019s coming at you all the time, from all sides. Fires here. Floods there. And with the recent Supreme Court decision that basically threw regulations out the window [Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo<\/em>, more commonly known as the Chevron case], it\u2019s even more bleak, with corporations holding the bulk of responsibility but being unwilling to make choices that would (if money is all they care about) preserve their future earning power.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n So I end up mentioning this in a lot of my writing because it\u2019s always there. I would like to be more hopeful about it all, and every now and then I read about something, some technology, some company that cares, some government doing more, something that gives me hope that we may evade whatever worse version of disaster, but it\u2019s hard to think that. I think the only way to move forward under these circumstances is to focus on small, joyful things each day, accumulating those things over a week and a month and a year.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n TEGETHOFF: <\/strong>There\u2019s this roving search for meaning among the characters in the collection. It almost feels paralytic at times. I\u2019m thinking, for example, of this passage from \u201cDick Cheney Was Not My Father\u201d:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n I was one of those people, like so many people I knew, who didn\u2019t have any absolutist sense of trajectory and what should be next. The things people my age knew seemed unessential and thin: how to play board games at big tables with friends while drinking whiskey and how to hibernate for days while binge watching almost anything; most of the rest of the life stuff, the grown-up stuff, we still somehow didn\u2019t know.<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Could you talk about how moments like this capture the dread of modern life?<\/p>\n <\/p>\n STUBER:<\/strong> In \u201cDick Cheney,\u201d the character is wrestling with how to make meaning in his life, when he\u2019s not getting meaning from his job, and with how to be a different kind of man and father from the kind his father is and was. He finds many things in his life trivial, but he ultimately finds that he gets meaning from being a parent and from parenting in a way that allows his child, a boy, to be however he wants, something his own father very much did not do for him. So, yes, a lot of these stories reflect the dread of modern life. But I also think that each story intentionally gives the characters moments of escape or happiness or abandon. I think that\u2019s all we have, really.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Sad Grownups Amy Stuber Stillhouse Press $16 (232 pages) Publication Date: October 8, 2024 The seventeen stories in Amy Stuber\u2019s debut collection, Sad Grownups, are filled with moments of beauty, dread, playfulness, and existential probing. With deft prose, Stuber captures these moods within the span of a single paragraph. The stories aim squarely at […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":8605,"template":"","categories":[9,140,49],"tags":[1981,889,6,1967,1979,1980],"class_list":["post-8604","article","type-article","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-aquifer","category-interview","category-literary-features","tag-amy-stuber","tag-aquifer","tag-aquifer-the-florida-review-online","tag-author-interview","tag-eric-tegethoff","tag-sad-grownups"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n
\nAmy Stuber
\nStillhouse Press
\n$16 (232 pages)
\nPublication Date: October 8, 2024<\/p>\n
\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/cah.ucf.edu\/floridareview\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/43\/2024\/10\/DSC_0364-scaled.jpg\")
Amy Stuber<\/strong> has published fiction in New England Review<\/em>, Missouri Review<\/em>, Copper Nickel<\/em>, and elsewhere. She’s a flash editor at Split Lip Magazine<\/em>. Her debut collection, SAD GROWNUPS<\/em>, comes out October 8 from Stillhouse Press.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"