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In the title story of Natalie Southworth’s debut collection, sisters sneak out of their unstable mother’s apartment to find “reality,” an experience with lasting repercussions. Southworth concentrates on moments like this—moments of disconnection, family fragility, and unexpected expressions of love.
The stories that make up There’s Always More to Say focus on characters struggling to achieve what they think they should want despite the demands and loneliness of our times. A puppeteer attempts to reinvent himself as a realtor. Preteen girls strive to become like their absentee fathers. A nanny must decide between her future or that of the family dog. A high-achieving working mother is imprisoned by her antidepressants.
Infused with humour and verve, yet full of warmth, Southworth interrogates the quest for more and what it means when ambition clashes with private reality.
With that we were children again, Rachel, age thirteen, reaching for my hand, pulling me, flying down the sidewalk, past where our parents’ car gradually, like a hearse, approached. Our mother sat in the passenger side, our father behind the wheel, on their way back from her first stay in the mental hospital. I didn’t stop to look closely but hightailed it with Rachel. We ran through the narrow squeeze between the neighbour’s house, into our yard and opened the aluminum storage shed, where we sat on the floor.
“You don’t want to kiss her,” Rachel said, wiping her lips with the back of her hand in a show of disgust, as if our mother’s frailty would soak through.
READ MOREFrom her pocket, Rachel pulled out a small orange, what my mother called a satsuma, and laid pretend plates at our feet. We were dryads, farmers, astronauts. Sometimes mothers. We sat in the shed when our parents argued, when our mother slept for days and our father was dazed with worry. When rain fell hard on the roof and the summer storms lashed the electrical wires, we sat side by side in the shed, which wasn’t so much a hideout from the world, but a hall for victors, toasting after battle.
COLLAPSETimothy Niedermann on Ottawa Review of Books wrote:"What better title than There’s Always More to Say for a collection of stories by a debut author who, presumably, is just getting started. In nine discrete tales, Natalie Southworth weaves the difficult topic of mental health with ordinary experiences of everyday life, told mainly from the perspective of an adolescent. She writes with compassion about characters who are suffering, individuals and families as a whole, blaming no one for the damage that is done but detailing how everyone is affected. Taken together, there is a sadness to the collection, a sense of failure or regret at our inability to protect the vulnerable, especially children, from the shattering and consequential episodes that go on to define their lives."
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"In this, author Natalie Southworth’s first short-story collection, three stories frame the other six: the first, “There’s Always More to Say,” the fifth, “The Bottom Line,” and the ninth and last, “Inheritance.” Each is narrated by Cora, the younger of two daughters in a family of four. The stories take place at different times during the girls’ lives—pre-teen, teen, and adult—as the family tries to cope with the mother’s mental issues and their effects on the other family members."
Read full review by clicking on the review link.
