Chilly family dynamics, giddy lesbian romances, and plangent regrets animate these heartfelt essays.
Horvitz, a University of North Carolina English professor, follows up The Girls of Usually (2015) with another set of short memoiristic pieces. Undergirding it are several glimpses of her mysteriously distant mother; in the title piece, Horvitz tells of traveling through Europe in her early 20s and calling home collect to Long Island from Norway only to have her mother brusquely refuse to accept the call. Things improve only slightly in “Unlimited Minutes,” in which Horvitz’s stepmother responded to a Mother’s Day call with brief thanks and then immediately hung up. Other essays recount Horvitz’s fitful exploration of her lesbian identity. In one, her encounter with a picture of kidnapped heir and bank robber Patty Hearst sporting a beret and a rifle inspired inchoate desires; in another, she recalls a grad school tutorial with Beat poet Allen Ginsberg, eulogizing his bravery as a pioneering champion of queer sexuality and his encouragement of her own journey. Many pieces are devoted to Horvitz’s difficult affairs, often with women who weren’t fully available because of geography, age, politics, or commitment issues, such as a veterinarian with three kids who lived across the country and refused to stop seeing other lovers. (The author eventually recognizes her own role in seeking out impossible liaisons and sets her sights on a more promising relationship.) Over the course of this book, Horvitz’s writing mixes sly humor with pathos and an eye for the nuances and pitfalls of human connection. Her prose is always precise, concrete, and evocative, whether she’s hymning the thrill of love with a younger woman—“it felt like porn when she flipped her leg onto mine, and we shared an apple cider froufrou drink”—or elegizing its wistful end: “She put her car in drive, waved one last time, and stepped back into her life, and I into mine, a chorus of leaf blowers blasting in the distance.” The result is a consistently beguiling read.
A scintillating collection, full of subtle wit and passionate yearning.