In 2007, when Danielle Evans was just 23, her short story, Virgins, appeared in The Paris Review. A tale of two girls navigating the new and predatory world of sex, booze, nightclubs, the night after Tupac is shot, it marked Evans as an impressive new voice in fiction, and eventually became the first story in her debut collection, Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self. Much lauded in the US when it was published in 2010, the collection is now being released on this side of the Atlantic, and it’s only a pity we’ve had to wait so long.
A black woman finds herself unexpectedly pregnant in a college where white women earn extortionate sums selling unfertilized eggs; a nine-year-old is sent as a “flawed peace offering” to her racist grandmother, only to become paralysed by fear of snakes in the walls; a soldier returns from Iraq with PTSD and tries to pass someone else’s daughter off as his own – Evans has a knack for punchy premises, and the skill and style to pull them off.
In just a few lines, she can capture the essence of a character – “brilliant in that completely useless way where he could tell you […] the historic relationship between the toothbrush and cultural imperialism, but not what day of the week it was”; a scene – “Passing through the bridge with the sloping wires on either side always feels to me like being inside of a giant stringed instrument”; or a relationship – “Geena had […] made me possible. Her boldness, which I’d always thought I’d been borrowing from her, had become mine in ways I didn’t realise until she was gone.”
The book’s central tension is held in the push-pull between agency and circumstance. These characters initiate action, then find their momentum has carried them much further than intended – were they ever really in control? As the protagonist of Virgins leaves a club with strangers, she imagines her mother’s reaction to a separate girl doing likewise – “what was that child thinking[?]” Now, she wants to tell her mother “she wasn’t thinking at all, one minute she was one place and the next she was another and it all happened before she could stop it.”
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Such tension allows themes of race, class, gender, coming of age, to emerge quite naturally, though the unique details and circumstances of the characters always lead the way. The result is an extraordinary and unified debut collection that has held its freshness despite the 13-year wait.
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