From Kate Walbert, the highly acclaimed, National Book Award nominee, comes a dazzling, career-spanning collection of new and selected stories about the trials of womanhood and the vulnerabilities of motherhood.
In these deft, acutely funny, heartbreaking stories, Kate Walbert delves into the hearts and minds of women in the age of anxiety. Her characters are uneasy in one way or another; they all yearn for connection; they all struggle to find meaning in their lives as mothers, wives, and daughters; they all try to find their own voices, often within isolated, and isolating, circumstances.
In the dazzling opening story “M&M World,” a mother is plunged into panic when she briefly loses one of her daughters at the Times Square store. In “Slow the Heart,” a mother tries to ease tension at the dinner table with Roses and Thorns, the game she knows the Obamas played in the White House. In “Radical Feminists,” a woman skating with her two children encounters the man who derailed her career a decade earlier. And in the story, “A Mother Is Someone Who Tells Jokes,” a grieving mother reflects on the kindergarten project that preceded her son’s autism diagnosis. She Was Like That is a deeply moving, resonant collection from a writer “rightly celebrated for her ability to capture the variety and vulnerability of women’s lives with a combination of lyricism and brawn” (NPR).
