The stories in this unflinchingly frank and emotionally resonant collection explore multiple effects of the traumas that women face, whether from abusive or emotionally absent partners, from the physical or psychological strains of motherhood, from sexual harassment, or from threatened or enacted violence. In doing so, the stories shed an unsparing light on individual women’s fears, struggles, and anxieties and on the root causes of their traumas. The result is a haunting and deeply relevant collection, one that often indicts the larger culture.
Leah, the protagonist of the collection’s opening story, “The Experiment,” is struggling on multiple fronts. Although she seems to have plenty of free time now that her six-year-old daughter, Skylar, has entered kindergarten, she is unable to get started on the novel she’d been hoping to write. Yet writer’s block seems to be the least of Leah’s problems. After Skylar’s birth, Leah suffered severe post-partum depression and then ongoing anxiety that made her husband, Derek, draw the line against them having the second child Leah had wanted. As for Derek, although he tries to tick various boxes of being a supportive husband, he seems to no longer be emotionally invested in the marriage, if in fact he ever was.
Another troubling development for Leah is the murder of a seven-year-old girl, whose body is found not far from where Leah, Derek, and Skylar live. With the murderer still on the loose, Leah’s ongoing anxiety is heightened by worries that she is unequal to the task of keeping Skylar safe. It doesn’t help that Skylar’s kindergarten teacher encourages counseling for Skylar in the wake of the murder.
Things seem to take a positive turn for Leah when she discovers the self-help book Magical Womanhood: The Subdued Power of the Feminine. This book argues for “a return to traditional values,” contending that “[w]omen are more powerful, more capable when they remain at home.” Though Leah finds much of the thoroughly trad-wife book “ridiculous,” she becomes taken with this particular passage:
As Leah reads the book, “the idea of The Experiment grew in her mind, until it became an escape plan, a life jacket, a gleaming hook she had been waiting to sink into the soft skin of her body.” The Experiment is Leah’s plan to enact principles from the book in her own marriage, with the goal of having something to write about. When Derek expresses alarm at the plan, saying it sounds like a return to the 1950s, Leah tries to reassure him that it’s only a means to an end.
Yet in time, The Experiment is taken to the extreme in ways that Leah couldn’t have predicted, revealing troubling power dynamics in her relationship with Derek and allowing him to act on long-simmering resentments. This turn of events makes it all too clear that the “magic” in Magical Womanhood is all about men’s needs, even when those needs involve sexual aggression and other forms of dominance.
But this story does more than implicitly criticize the trad-wife phenomenon. It also vividly captures both the search for purpose, meaning, and control over one’s circumstances, and the sense of emptiness and anxiety that can result when this search fails.
The title story of the collection, “It’s No Fun Anymore,” also features a troubled spousal relationship, but under strikingly different circumstances. In the story, the protagonist, Mel, and her husband, John, return to an anime convention they’d attended in the past, this time bringing their one-year-old daughter, Bea. Early in the story, Mel regrets the decision, saying she feels “ridiculous” at the convention, where she’s wearing an otome kei dress that no longer fits her so well post-pregnancy and that’s the polar opposite of the she-devil costume she wore to the previous convention. As a thirty-something, she also believes she looks old in comparison to the other costumed attendees, several of whom are wearing the revealing sorts of costumes Mel seems to have set aside for good. In these newly strange-seeming surroundings, Mel feels protective of Bea, and she would seem to prefer that the two of them vanish into the upholstery. At one point, Mel observes, “I can’t shake this sense that everything is unsafe.”
Mel reflects that at the previous convention, the she-devil costume attracted loads of attention–some of it positive (including from a photographer, who took a professional-grade picture of Mel), but much of it unwelcome. For example, while having a drink at a bar with her husband, John, she was rated on a one-to-ten looks scale by a man sitting next to her. Almost worse, in an attempt to stand up for her, John bought into the stranger’s ratings system. This scene raises an uncomfortable truth: that all too often, it’s fair game to comment on a woman’s looks, and to try to undermine any sense of agency or power that might come from her choice of clothing. (In the case of the convention, her costume seems no more revealing than those of many male attendees.) The scene also drives home a central point about Mel and John’s relationship: At multiple points of the story, he seems completely unaware of Mel’s discomfort, which becomes especially acute during the convention in the present tense of the story. This lack of awareness seems to extend beyond the convention, suggesting that Mel and John’s relationship may be doomed–or, at the very least, destined for ongoing unhappiness.
Just as important as the goings-on at the past and present conventions, and in Mel and John’s relationship, is Mel’s relationship with her sister, Lacey, from whom she’s mostly estranged. Unlike Mel, Lacey is religious and socially conservative. In another difference between the sisters, Lacey stayed in the sisters’ hometown while Mel fled it for Washington, D.C. But, as Mel reflects, she and Lacey share a key similarity: “we both try, in our own imperfect way, to escape those long shadows that haunt us.” The exact nature of those long shadows isn’t specified, but one is left to wonder if the sisters share some past trauma. Near the end of the story, when Mel learns of a crisis in Lacey’s life, she tells John, “I want to go home.” This takes on a deeper meaning given the geographical and emotional distance between the sisters, which Mel seems to want to bridge. Here and in other scenes, the story deftly explores Mel’s alienation from her current life, suggesting a desire for more meaningful connections.
In ”A Safe Haven for Writers,” alienation is just one threat posed by the creepy, out-in-the-middle-of-nowhere writer’s retreat that is the setting of the story, which echoes the setting of The Shining both physically and psychologically. As a big fan of horror, I was especially taken with this story, not only because it’s truly spine-chilling but also because it cleverly uses horror tropes to explore attempts to gaslight and dominate women, both physically and emotionally.
The site of the writer’s retreat, Salt House, was named for a memoirist, Leonard Salt, who lived there with his much younger wife, Ines. Early on, we get a sense of why the place is far from a safe haven. It’s fallen almost into ruin, the only other resident seems to be a creepy caretaker, and none of the doors lock, including the one to the protagonist’s room. It seems fitting that she’s come to the retreat to work on a collection of domestic horror stories. But her troubling surroundings are not conducive to productivity.
Nor is the emotional weight that the retreat carries for her. Early in the story, she reflects: “This trip is supposed to be my metamorphosis, my odyssey, my chance to prove to my husband that I am still an independent woman who can get by on her own, at least some of the time.” Eventually, we learn that the couple is in therapy, and that the husband lodged this complaint with the therapist: “I feel like her caretaker.”
Early in her residence, the protagonist learns more than she might want to about Leonard Salt. In a desk drawer, she discovers newsletters from the so-called Salt Society, which based on a photograph from one issue, was (and still is?) made up of old white men brandishing gardening tools like weapons. The picture brings to mind a coven, and unpublished works by Salt featured in the newsletters (e.g., “Canoodling with Cannibals”) suggest dark goings-on on the property. The call for new applicants that ends each newsletter–requesting ”YOUNG ARTISTS, ESPECIALLY”–feels like a plea for fresh meat, and by this point in the story, the protagonist seems to be at the very center of the carving board.
Her uneasy feelings about Salt are heightened when, during a hike to a nearby river, she discovers a sort of treehouse in the woods. Suspended from the treehouse is a platform topped with a child’s mattress. In front of this, lawnchairs are arranged in a semicircle, and nearby are the remnants of what appears to have been some ritual (“corroded shovels, plastic jugs filled with dull liquid, a stainless-steel basin”). The protagonist observes: “Had Leonard come here with Ines? These signs of life might have been from decades ago or yesterday.” Once again, images of a Salt Society coven come to mind.
The protagonist gets even more background on Salt when she reads his book Hulda’s Gift. The Hulda of the title was Salt’s first wife, and Salt tells a tale of becoming captivated by Hulda’s teenage niece, who turns out to be Ines. He describes Ines as being “resistant” to his advances before she “capitulates.” But we get the sense that Salt was a straight-up sexual predator. We also learn that, according to Salt, Hulda’s death was the “gift” that allowed him and Ines to marry and settle down in the house where the protagonist is staying.
Salt also describes Hulda’s decision to forgive his infidelity and “take responsibility for her own role in the ordeal.” At this point, the protagonist is infuriated:
This anger carries over to a phone call between the protagonist and her husband, during which she expresses frustration that Salt got a book deal and critical praise for openly writing about his sexual predation. Her husband seems sympathetic to this concern. But when she describes her fear that “something terrible” might be going on on the property, he says, “You see the sinister in everything. … The problem is your perspective. God, your negativity is exhausting.”
Here, the protagonist is very much being gaslit, and her husband’s ostensible attempt to address her concerns carries an implicit threat. “You can leave whenever you want,” he tells her. “Nobody’s keeping you here.” But the protagonist understands that “if I leave now, it will be the end of my marriage. I will be written off. A woman who can’t take care of herself.”
In the end, she learns the hard lesson that the house is not at all about her needs as a writer, and certainly not about the needs of any woman. This striking passage brings home this troubling reality:
The passages that follow are every bit as striking, delivering still more chilling revelations to the protagonist as the story draws to a close. Although the ending, and the story as a whole, makes the moves of a horror story, and does so with chilling precision, the protagonist’s perspective gives the moves deep, personal resonance and larger relevance.
To conclude, I highly recommend not just the stories I’ve covered but also the collection as a whole. Brittany Micka-Foos is a writer to watch, and I’m very much looking forward to reading more of her work.
Would My Pick be Your Pick?
If you're interested in ________, the answer may be "Yes":￭ Stories about women’s struggles with trauma
￭ Stories about motherhood and its challenges
￭ Stories about troubled relationships
￭ Horror stories