Why Don't You Stop Talking - Softcover

Kay, Jackie

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0330511807 ISBN 13: 9780330511803

Publisher: Picador, 2011

Synopsis

‘A stunner. I am heartbroken to have finished it’ Ali Smith

In Jackie Kay’s first collection of stories, ordinary lives are transformed by secrets. Her world might seem familiar – sex, death and family cast long shadows – but the roles of mothers, daughters and lovers are imagined and revealed in the most surprising of ways.

Sometimes it is the things that we choose to hide within ourselves which can transform us – and that has never been more true than in Jackie Kay’s warm, exuberant storytelling. She sees the extraordinary in everyday life, and lights it up with humour and generosity in a way that is uniquely her own.

‘If stories like these can still be written, the short story form must still be alive, not to say kicking’ Irish Times

About this title

Review

Fear, fantasy, loneliness and desire are the themes of Jackie Kay's debut collection of short stories, Why Don't You Stop Talking. Brian the fitter in "Shark! Shark!" has a hysterical fear of sharks that dominates his life. In "Big Milk" a woman's passionate jealousy of her lesbian lover's relationship with her baby forces her to revisit her own childhood. Kay has a particular talent for describing the physical manifestations of psychological troubles. In "The woman with knife and fork disorder" the breakdown of the ability to organise cutlery stands in for a woman's mental dissolution in response to sudden abandonment by her husband, while in the Kafkaesque "Shell", a stoical, isolated single mother turns slowly and painfully into a tortoise. If you want to see what happens when the stylistic resonances of Borges and Gogol meet impeccable feminism, this is it.

Many of these stories mediate an uncertain boundary between the literal and the metaphorical, and much of their pleasure and challenge lies in this ambivalence. Kay's poetic voice is well suited to the short story form. This is the Jackie Kay of The Adoption Papers and Off Colour: serious, redemptive, forcing the consumer-sanitised reader to recognise the truly impoverished, traumatised reality around them. The heart-aching "In between talking about the elephant" is a particularly brilliant example of how fantasy enables people to survive the banal inevitability of the ordinary experience of death. Kay is good on the troubled relationships between teenagers and their parents and there are a number of lighter and energetically comical stories that add levity to the otherwise twilight tone of this collection. Why Don't You Stop Talking is a memorable collection about the pathology of everyday life. Through these stories, Kay fundamentally challenges and renders suspicious the notion that there are such beings as untroubled, ordinary people.--Rachel Holmes

Review

'A haunting, beautifully written debut' Times 'Miraculously convincing and beautifully written' Daily Telegraph 'An incredibly powerful novel, rich and satisfying' Guardian

Edition details

• Publisher: Picador
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 0330511807
• ISBN 13: 9780330511803
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 256