Long Story Short
Elyse Friedman
(published by House of Anansi Press Inc.)
View Elyse Friedman's video
Excerpt from Long Story Short (PDF) as it appeared in the National Post on October 4, 2008.
Friedman's fiction, described as "part Kafka, part South Park" (Toronto Star), is as funny as it is fierce, as witty as it is empathetic. Here, in her best, most mature, and most nuanced work, she offers a dark, comically off-beat, and surprisingly heartbreaking novella about a young man who copes with the passage into adulthood by cultivating an almost fanatically ironic view of the world, but who is ultimately forced to deliver a death blow to irony — which visits him in the form of a washed-up '80s sitcom star.
In the accompanying handful of short stories, Friedman demonstrates her sure touch with everyday situations and her uncanny, precise ability to expose the strangeness at the heart of "normal." Her moving story "The Soother," about a middle-aged man who copes with intense demands from family and friends by visiting a prostitute he pays to coddle and soothe him, won Gold at the 2006 National Magazine Awards for fiction and was published in the Toronto Life summer fiction issue. A second story, "Lost Kitten," was also nominated for a 2006 National Magazine Award, and "Truth" was selected for the Journey Prize Anthology and appeared in Best Canadian Stories.
Elyse Friedman
(photo by Matthew Plexman)
Elyse Friedman is the critically acclaimed author of two novels, Then Again (Random House Canada/Vintage), which was shortlisted for the 2000 Trillium Book Award, and Waking Beauty (Crown U.S.). She is also the author of the poetry collection, Know Your Monkey (ECW). Elyse has contributed poems and short fiction to literary journals and anthologies across Canada and in the U.S., and the short story "The Soother" won the Gold National Magazine Award for Fiction in 2006. Friedman lives in Toronto.
Excerpt from Long Story Short
Take from "The Virtual Tour"
Brian wasn't as keen on homeownership as Marla was. She had house lust. She'd always had it. When she was a kid in the late 1960s, her parents took her driving downtown one Sunday. They wanted to show her how the poor people lived, and how lucky she was to reside in a shiny new subdivision just south of Steeles Avenue. They trolled slowly through Cabbagetown, pointing at the old men drinking beer and smoking cigarettes on their front stoops, pointing at the undershirts, pointing at the tattoos. But Marla didn't feel lucky; she felt envious. She loved the sagging porches and peeling paint and unruly dandelion lawns. These were house like she had never seen in the suburbs—storybook houses with stained glass windows and wooden pillars, steeply pitched roofs and gingerbread trim. Houses with gables and balconies, windowed dormers in the attic, and sometimes even turrets. She felt in her gut that she had always known them. A correspondence.
As soon as she was old enough, Marla moved downtown. The plan was for her to stay on the pullout couch in her aunt's (disappointingly new) condo in Village by The Grange, while she attended the Ontario College of Art. Marla slept at her aunt's place twice. On the third day of school, a classmate, the cute video artist named Brian, invited her to his Baldwin Street apartment for dinner-homemade yellow pea soup and a case of Molson Ex. She never left.
Long Story Short by Elyse Friedman. Published by House of Anansi Press Inc. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.
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2008 shortlist:
