Don’t Try This at Home by Angela Readman
by JP Poole
The first sign that Don’t Try This as Home isn’t your typical short story collection is the whirl of jackalopes on the cover. The second is the book’s opening sentence: “I cut my boyfriend in half; it was what we both wanted.” For as often as women are maimed on the page, I was certainly intrigued. Have the tables been turned? The fact that the speaker states that it was a mutual decision is what kept me reading since I don’t care for gore or gratuitous violence in my books—I keep it PG-13.
Angela Readman has a particular type of humor that I can’t quite put my finger on but that I know hinges on her ability to charm. Recently, I heard a writing instructor say that “charm” is the hardest thing to teach MFA students. Talent can be cultivated but charm? Either you have it or you don’t. In the title story “Don’t Try This at Home” the speaker and her boyfriend decided this body-severing should take place because the couple could “double their time together.” The boyfriend states “he could be twice as productive.” They’re about to get married and, well, planning for a wedding is intense. When the narrator cuts her boyfriend in half by chopping him in two with a shovel, he becomes doubled, two boyfriends for the price of one. Suddenly, there’s a lot less housework, and more quality time. She observes her two boyfriends, two Daniels, with awe:
They took Daniel’s ‘brother’ on at the engineering firm where he already worked. The night before he started he laid his clothes on the chair like a kid before a new term at school. When he’d been working for a while, I asked him, ‘Do you have lunch with yourself?’ I mean, at work?’‘No,’ he said.‘Why not?’‘I’m my superior, it’s not done.’
To maximize the couple’s earnings, she cuts him in half again, but each Daniel created is a little bit off. Some have secret lives. One she learns is cheating on her. The humor of Readman’s story is linked with something painfully true; it’s hard to get ahead these days. Being one person isn’t really enough. Women are more often the ones divided to fit into a pie chart of selves: girlfriend/wife; child-rearer/caregiver; worker/professional; home maker/manager; emotional support giver; and on and on. The story also hints at how much easier it is for men to have “secret lives,” to keep parts of themselves hidden from their partners.
Most of the stories in the collection put women at their center of the story. Readman’s characters are fascinating because they exist on the fringe. In “There’s A Woman Works Down The Chip Shop,” a woman who works deep frying fish all day turns into Elvis after being flirted with by a young lass, who loves a little extra free food (and also, we learn, happens to be married). It’s a sweet and sad story about a woman who, for a short time, gets her sexual mojo back by channeling the king.
In another story, “Birds Without Wings,” a girl typically housed in fat camp each summer travels to Mexico with her mother. All she wants is the romantic version of travel, which to her means Paris. The story opens:
Last summer, it was me and Eva against everything evil in the world: swimsuits, kale, something that buzzed in our room. Yet I couldn’t stop thinking about Diana Pinter, some girl at school who went to Paris with her mother. I lay on a bunk scratching mosquito bites and pictured them outside the Eiffel Tower, eating salad in the rain.
Readman is able to capture nuances of character so beautifully; it breaks one’s heart a little. Life so often isn’t what we want. We are covetous creatures but Readman proves the imagination is perhaps a way we offer ourselves a bit of love.
I never would have discovered this book if I wasn’t tasked with restocking books at the store. Don’t Try This at Home was published in 2015, and I certainly don’t remember much in the way of buzz. There’s a lag, I’ve noticed, between books published in the U.S. and the U.K.; it seems one-sided, in that it’s harder for British writers to get recognized in the U.S. than it is the other way around. Small presses like And Other Stories certainly help to foster a more balanced exchange.
With a glut of books in the marketplace it’s hard for the vast majority of writers to get any notice at all, especially for a small collection of short stories. This is why I love Readman’s last sentence on her acknowledgements page: “[This book] is dedicated to anyone who has felt like giving up, but did not.”
Amidst Britishisms such as chip shop, crisps, costume, and jumper, I think readers will discover, in Readman, a shining gem of a writer, who tells stories with a massive heart.*
* Chip shop or chippy (fish and chip shop); crisps (potato chips); costume (bathing suit); jumper (pullover/sweater).