IN OTHER LIFETIMES ALL I'VE LOST COMES BACK TO ME

by Courtney Sender ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2023

Intertwined tales of longing, regret, and the Holocaust.

This collection takes its title from the first story, in which a woman wishing that any one of the men who has left her would come back finds them all on her doorstep. When they tell her that she can have them all or she can remain alone, she sets them an impossible task. Suffused with a desperate desire for lives that might have been, this affecting fable sets the tone for the fiction to come. In “For Somebody So Scared,” a woman named Bridget remembers how the greatest love of her life, Kaye, made it inevitable that she would abandon her. In “From Somebody So Scared,” Kaye describes the moment when, after an absence lasting decades, Bridget returns. We see a similar device in “I Am Going To Lose Everything I Have Loved” and “To Lose Everything I Have Ever Loved,” both stream-of-consciousness stories narrated by a woman named Dinah. In the former, she presents herself as a familiar figure: the woman who doesn’t want to know that her married lover is never going to leave his wife. She is as self-obsessed as she is obsessed with Samuel, and she radiates damage. What makes her heartbreaking is that she is haunted. She’s haunted by her grandmother who survived the camps, and she also feels like the cousins who never had a chance to be born because of the Holocaust have a claim on her life and her body. In the sequel story, Dinah discovers that winning her lover for herself doesn’t mean that she can trust love. Although this is Sender’s first book, she’s no novice. She has an MFA from the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars. She’s a Yaddo and McDowell fellow. And she has published in such well-known journals as Kenyon Review and Prairie Schooner. There are stories here that feel immature—more like student exercises than finished works—but Sender’s willingness to explore primal hurts makes her fiction compelling.

A distinctive debut from a promising author.

Pub Date: March 1, 2023

ISBN: 9781952271786

Page Count: 208

Publisher: West Virginia Univ. Press

Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2023

Categories: GENERAL FICTION | SHORT STORIES | LITERARY FICTION