SOMEONE SHOULD KNOW THIS STORY

Gerber collects stories from across five decades in this volume of short fiction.

The author has had a prolific career stretching back to the 1960s. In addition to her 19 novels for children and adults, she has published dozens of short stories (including 42 in Redbook alone). This volume collects some of the best, including the O. Henry Award–winning “I Don’t Believe This,” in which a woman helps her sister navigate her separation from an abusive and suicidal husband. Family is a frequent topic across these tales. In one story, a young woman who’s never been to a funeral travels to New York to attend her uncle’s memorial service, where she’s exposed not only to death for the first time, but also to the long-simmering resentments of her father’s family. “We pile back in the cars, in the same distribution as before, and we drive away,” the woman narrates after the event. “There. I have seen a funeral—I have seen it all, and what do I know? I have understood nothing.” In another, more humorous look at family dynamics, a woman recounts the period of her childhood when her father attempted to become an inventor. (One of his ideas: fried chicken–skin sandwiches to be sold at Coney Island.) Another recurring theme across these 25 stories is the way in which the past inevitably intrudes on the present, even after many years. A young mother gets a call one day out of the blue from a man she went to college with but hasn’t heard from since: “I had thought of Ricky often in the kind of reveries in which we all engage when we count the lives that never were meant to be for us,” she admits. A number of the stories—including “Anna in Chains,” “Anna Passes On,” and “Anna’s Archive”—follow a character named Anna Mazer, inspired by Gerber’s own mother, who frequently finds herself at odds with the world around her.

In story after story, the author demonstrates a deep sensitivity to the ways in which people miscomprehend each other, even when one party is attempting to be honest. “It makes me feel desperate, as if I have no control over my life,” says Anna in one story, speaking to a pair of younger, bored neighbors who don’t care that their dog barks all day and night, eroding Anna’s sanity. In “I Don’t Believe This,” the abusive brother-in-law, fresh off an unsuccessful attempt at overdosing, arrives at the narrator’s house to ask, “[C]an’t you treat me like regular old me; can’t you ask me to come in and have dinner with you? I’m not a monster. Can’t anyone, anyone, be nice to me?” In the absence of sensational, dramatic events, such vulnerability, which is so rarely understood or reciprocated, forms the nucleus around which many of these ripped-from-life stories circle. Whether they’re longtime fans or are discovering Gerber for the first time, readers will take much from this collection, which feels like not only the culmination of a long career but of a long life.

A book of consistently arresting and engaging stories about family life.