Sarah Braunstein's All You Have to Do

Pic: Grant Cornett / Hand Lettering: Mousecake

I read Sarah Braunstein's compelling short story in The New Yorker here.  As I read I listened to the accompanying sound file with the writer reading her story.  (Does that count as me reading - which I was - if the audio file was running too?)

It's a good read.  Short stories are meant to include a twist at the end and Sarah B delivers one - for this modern age of ours - but credible nevertheless.  The story is set in an unnamed town in 1972 when the central character Sid Baumwell is, we're told, sixteen.  I was fifteen that year so the story touches on a familiar period of awkward adolescence.  Sarah B captures that time, those emotions, the uncertainty and the smothering small town feel of Sid's situation very well.  It wasn't hard to suspend disbelief and go with the flow,  I laughed more than once - at the continuous repetition of "Sid said", the magnitude of a life time's supply of aluminium foil, the awfulness we wrongly find as teenagers in family life - and the slight twist at the end made me pause to think about how a comfortable and safe growing up (such as I enjoyed) sometimes, perhaps always, hangs on fragile, invisible threads which, if we're lucky in our growing up (as I was too) we seldom notice.

Well worth reading.

Sarah Braunstein's web site is here.