Saturday Lunch with the Brownings

Nobody inspires in me as much intense sorrow, rage, and fear as Mortimer consistently does in her stories.

She mines the rich elements of terror in domesticity: the deep discontent in everyday lives and relationships, the questionable compromises, the turbulent unhappiness brewing beneath the polite façade of domestic bliss. She makes my fist clench, jaw tense, heart quicken, my breath stop. She makes me squirm with discomfort, seethe with fury, almost mad with despair.

It's almost vicious this unhappiness that she inflicts on me, yet I cannot help but seek her out for more.

Favourite stories: Saturday Lunch with the Brownings, I Told You So, and What a Lovely Surprise.

This is another book I picked up thanks to this excellent book list article in the TLS.

The stories in this collection depict some rather everyday mundane events in an incredibly emotionally vivid way, casting a series of harrowing pictures of depressed and oppressed women and girls in unpleasant relationships. The was made all the more poignant when I looked up Penelope Mortimer's obituary online and discovered that much of this was semi-autobiographical.

There is one bit of quite shocking casual racism in one of the stories which threw me out of the narrative. And one of the stories featured some unsettling animal neglect which I just couldn't stomach. (how is it that I can manage to read about people being shits to other humans but I show more couldn't stomach the animal cruelty?) Apart from these two bits, this is an extremely well written and evocative collection - just have something or someone cheerful on hand to pick you back up afterwards. show less