In Lesley, in Therapy, from Naomi Wood’s first collection of short stories, the titular character is returning from maternity leave. She is attending compulsory “Group Therapy for Returning Parents’. Lesley would rather get straight to work, and she quickly becomes frustrated with the therapist’s insights. The therapist tells Lesley, in another precise aphorism, trauma is not something that can be simply stated or expressed in language. Lesley’s response? To throw a pen at the therapist’s forehead. It’s a response that arguably provides evidence to the therapist’s claim: it’s difficult to talk about our feelings.
Throughout Wood’s collection, we often see characters struggling with their feelings. In Flatten the Curve, while managing work and parental duties, Deborah claps for carers and watches the Covid-19 death toll rise. Like we all did, Deborah undertakes ritualistic and communal behaviours that appear laden with meaning and a greater sense of purpose but ultimately engender hopelessness. There isn’t a metaphor big enough to explain the pandemic, Deborah repeats to herself, unable to find the language to conceptualise her experience.
Lesley, Deborah and several other characters are mothers. For Claudia in Hurt Feelings, she is contending with memories from the miscarriage of her second child while pregnant with her third. A sad and tragic irony laces this story: she’s developing patient testimonials for analgesics as she battles with her own psychological trauma and pain no drug can easily wipe away. Our society looks for quick fixes. Togetherness and space for people to articulate, and potentially overcome, what troubles us is what her characters really need.
The story is a little axiomatic – there’s a knowingness to the characters’ dialogue too obviously rebounding against the story’s themes – but this is an otherwise excellent collection (which also contains the BBC Short Story Prize winner, Comorbidities). Wood subtly and swiftly switches in and out of her characters’ consciousnesses to give us clipped glimpses of their inner and outer lives. In the concise art form of the short story, Wood only seems to make our modern world appear stranger and more incomprehensible.
