HOW TO TALK TO GIRLS (& OTHER URBAN MYTHS)

These collected pieces of creative nonfiction, prose, and poetry consider life’s dark and bright moments.

In his fifth book, Hickey brings together autobiographical essays, fictional vignettes, and poems often but not always reflective of a writer’s life. In the opening piece, for example, “Chasing Richard Russo,” Hickey recounts his pride as a 21-year-old writing student in getting an A from his professor, “AKA God.” In contrast, one of the class’s best writers only earned a B. That was in 1978; in 2002, the B student—Russo—won a Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Hickey, in contrast, taught at a community college, wasn’t famous, and his alcoholism was destroying his marriage. Clearly, there had been a terrible mistake and Russo got the life Hickey should have had. Years later, after a few misadventures (like drunk-dialing Russo), the now-sober Hickey made peace with his life and the celebrated novelist’s success. One of the collection’s funniest essays, “Autumn, Agony, and Endorphins,” also presents Hickey’s flaws with honesty and rueful wit as he recounts running the Seattle Marathon. Suffering at Mile 23, he reflected on the irony of paying “a $50 entrance fee when one of my students would have gladly volunteered to beat my legs with a baseball bat for free.” More solemn creative nonfiction entries include the author’s letter to his biological mother, in which he enters imaginatively into her life; an account of Hickey’s volunteer work with a writing program for kids in youth detention; and an appreciation of Flannery O’Connor.  

The fictional vignettes are varied in subject and mood, including a paean to service dogs, letters to Pluto and a placenta, and the painful outcome of an erection-enhancing drug cocktail. Some of these pieces can seem heavy-handed, as in “Mel the Incel.” The title misogynist leans out from his window to threaten a woman wearing an orange halter top. She shoots him in the head, and he remembers while dying how a girl who wore an orange halter top didn’t come to his childhood birthday party. As a reason for hating women, this is overly simplistic. The collection’s sexual politics can also seem somewhat antediluvian. Hickey, for example, claims in the title essay that women “have all the power” because he doesn’t understand them and they bear children. Though meant humorously, it’s still a dismissive notion of what power really entails. Similarly, the genuine issue of women’s marginalization through language is caricatured as nothing more than a whiny bid for attention in “Belgian Waffles.” The volume’s poems are as wide-ranging as the vignettes, with the subjects including sympathy for those in mourning, relationships between parent and child, mortality, love, wry or existential musings, and more. At their best, these pieces movingly express compassion, including to the juvenile offenders in “Prison Poetry.” In “Wiggle Room,” one of the strongest poems, a husband’s spirit advises his wife on how to avoid sinking into quicksand: “Be patient, avoid large sweeping motions / (life is so important we must move very slowly).”

A collection that’s sometimes well observed and sometimes off the mark.