The stories in Some Day This Will Be Funny marry memory to moment in a union of narrative form as immaculate and imperfect as the characters damned to act them out on page. Lynne Tillman, author of American Genius, presides over the ceremony; Clarence Thomas, Marvin Gaye, and Madame Realism mingle at the reception. Narrators – by turn infamous and nameless – shift within their own skin, struggling to unknot reminiscence from reality while scenes rush into warm focus, then cool, twist, and snap in the breeze of shifting thought. Epistle, quotation, and haiku bounce between lyrical passages of lucid beauty, echoing the scattered, cycling arpeggio of Tillman’s preferred subject: the unsettled mind. Collectively, these stories own a conscience shaped by oaths made and broken; by the skeleton silence and secrets of family; by love’s shifting chartreuse. They traffic in the quiet images of personal history, each one a flickering sacrament in danger of being swallowed up by the lust and desperation of their possessor: a fistful of parking tickets shoved in the glove compartment, a little black book hidden from a wife in a safe-deposit box, a planter stuffed with flowers to keep out the cooing mourning doves. They are stories fashioned with candor and animated by fits of wordplay and invention – stories that affirm Tillman’s unshakable talent for wedding the patterns and rituals of thought with the blushing immediacy of existence, defying genre and defining experimental short fiction.
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"Tillman’s gorgeous and potent latest finds the innovative author embracing diverse, imaginative forms in these often brief but always intriguing tales"—Publishers Weekly Starred Review
"Gorgeously at ease and technically virtuosic...Tillman is simply a terrific prose stylist whose work should have wide appeal—"New York Times Book Review
"Clever intricate fictions that map both the complication and comedy of the moments that most writers miss—"Times Literary Supplement
Product Details
Paperback: 160 pages
Publisher: Red Lemonade; First Edition edition (April 22, 2011)
Here's an Author's Bio. It could be written differently. I've written many for myself and read lots of other people's. None is right or sufficient, each slants one way or the other. So, a kind of fiction - selection of events and facts.. So let me just say: I wanted to be a writer since I was eight years old. That I actually do write stories and novels and essays, and that they get published, still astonishes me. Right now, I'm working on a novel, my sixth, and also some stories and will be working on an art essay or two soon.
In April, a new collection of stories, Someday This Will Be Funny, will be pubbed by Red Lemonade Press. There is no story called Someday This Will Be Funny in it: it's a title that comments on all the stories, maybe.
Each spring, I teach writing at University at Albany, in the English Dept., and in the fall, at The New School, in the Writing Dept.
I've lived with David Hofstra, a bass player, for many years. It makes a lot of sense to me that I live with a bass player, since time and rhythm are extremely important to my writing. He's also a wonderful man.
As time goes by, my thoughts about writing change, how to write THIS, or why I do. There are no stable answers to a process that changes, and a life that does too. Writing, when I'm inhabiting its world, makes me happy, or less unhappy. I also feel engaged in and caught up in politics here, and in worlds farther away.
When I work inside the world in which I do make choices, I'm completely absorbed in what happens, in what can emerge. Writing is a beautiful, difficult relationship with what you know and don't know, have or haven't experienced, with grammar and syntax, with words, primarily, with ideas, and with everything else that's been written.
Lynne Tillman is a writer really like no other but if comparisons were forced perhaps Jane Bowles, Thomas Bernhard come to mind. She is at the height of her powers in this collection. She faces death, life, ghosts, memory, time and the absurd business of the human condition with a deft and mysterious touch.
It's the kind of collection you can pick up, read a few of its short, dazzling pieces and feel smarter, graced, less of a failure (for knowing you are one), an enrichment that comes from small phrases of time, an hour here or there. Read the last story, for instance, and feel you love this person and also know how hard it is to be her. To be you.
Having read some reviews in BookForum which referenced literary icons, and how girls think and spend time in their rooms, I checked out this book at the library; after skimming a few pages of Love Sentence, pp 111-136 which is brilliant. I haven't read Green Girl yet, but Love Sentence must certainly outdo it in references. The obsessive nature of the letters to past or even future lovers is probably universal at least in thought sequences while lying in bed.
Definitely would like to read other works, esp. This Is Not It.
The Someday collection, other than Love Sentence, is rather prosaic or journalistic documentary style in my opinion. But I have only read about half the collection.
