Barrelhouse Reviews: In Other Lifetimes All I’ve Lost Comes Back to Me by Courtney Sender
Reviewed by Alexandra Grabbe
West Virginia University Press / March 2023 / 208 pp
This book is fierce. This book is rowdy. This book makes you think about all the relationships in your life that have not panned out as you might have hoped. Courtney Sender’s collection of fourteen interlocking short stories screams, “Pay attention. Why is love so hard? Why are we destined to lose the people we love?”
Loss and loneliness and longing are recurring themes. Sender’s narrators search specifically for a love match that will bring children into the world because that’s what paternal grandmother Nana Itta demands. She haunts Dinah at night, when sleep is elusive. Nana Itta appears in the eighth story, urging her grand-daughter to procreate in order to “keep our family alive even after they had killed us.” In “To Lose Everything I Have Ever Loved,” Dinah complains to Nana Itta that her boyfriend Samuel has left her and is never coming back. In “Missives,” Nana Itta warns, “Your life is not a gift to sleep through. Even if it isn’t what you’d wanted. Wake up and be in it.”
Nana Itta isn’t the only ghost in these stories. There’s no direct mention of the Holocaust, but it hovers in the background, influencing the present. In “Black Harness,” Gus and Olivia are about to visit a concentration camp. Olivia finds she cannot forget the relatives who lost their lives at a similar camp. She wants Gus to return to America with her. He chooses to stay. Overwhelmed, she deserts him when the tour guide checks his list of disembarking tourists and calls her name. “Olivia said nothing. She felt the sad beginnings of a shift, some empty-vacuum space left over where love has shrunk to pity. Gus didn’t see: bloodletting was in her genes, as surely as her blond hair. It was hers and her brother’s and their parents’, it was her cousin’s, sideways and up along their lineage. Her Nana’s lost brother and sister—there were so many lost, their names on the wrong lists, their bodies spattered open as a consequence—had understood blood.”
Sender is particularly adept at using words in a fresh way. She also uses repetition effectively, as in “The Docent,” with the phrase More Hell. “The Docent” introduces us to a concentration camp guard and a favorite prisoner who had worked as the curator of an art gallery in Berlin before the war. Since the prisoner-narrator speaks English, she is chosen as a tour guide for reporter Edward R. Murrow. The interaction between the prisoner and the guard feels like a slow minuet, interrupted when American soldiers liberate the camp.
In the title story, the narrator imagines assembling her former lovers and asking them, one by one, to change their minds. First initials stand in for names: A, B, C, D and Y, X, W, V. Speaking in unison, the men declare, “You are our great missed chance.” For the first time, the narrator puts words to what she initially thought she wanted out of life. “The life I’d wanted—simple and unambitious—looked like my parents’ lives.” She has waited and hoped and waited some more. In this extremely original story, the narrator realizes she has turned to wood from all the waiting.
Sender writes sentences to savor. “The leaves of Paradise soft beneath us both,” from “Lilith In God’s Hands,” or “We both know something is better than nothing when it comes to love,” and “Someday I’ll be so full of the strength of having had him that I can coast on it for years after I don’t,” from “To Lose Everything I Have Ever Loved.”
These stories were conceived over a period of years but feel timely in a post-pandemic era. Sender’s narrators seek loving relationships and keep losing them. Kaye and Bridget, for example; Sender allows each woman to explain, a dozen years later, why their five-month affair failed. First, in “For Somebody So Scared,” we get Bridget’s version. Later in the collection, Kaye narrates “From Somebody So Scared.” Fortunately, their story ends on a positive note. At least for the time being.
These stories have sharp edges. You need time to experience their richness. Slide them into the back of your mind and let them gnaw at you.
Alexandra Grabbe is a former talk show host in Paris, a former green innkeeper on Cape Cod, and a forever writer, currently located in Stromstad, Sweden. Her recent work has appeared in the Washington Post, Fiction on the Web UK, and Heavy Feather Review. She is putting the finishing touches on a collection of stories on transgenerational grief over the decades after the Bolshevik Revolution.