In "A Well-Imagined Life", the first story in Canadian writer Elyse Gasco's debut collection Can You Wave Bye Bye, Baby?, an adopted teenage girl imagines the circumstances of her birth and the fate of her unknown birthmother. In the second story a soon-to-be mother, also adopted, becomes a curious observer of her own pregnancy, again wondering uneasily about her own family history. In the third, a young woman is haunted by the ghost of her birth mother in the wake of her adoptive mother's death.
See a pattern emerging? Well, whatever about the recurring nature - and potential tediousness - of Gasco's themes, the sheer force and originality of the writing in this collection make it worth reading from cover to cover. In each story, she layers the shocking, the touching and the blackly comic to create narratives brimming with razor-sharp description, quicksilver wordplay and sad little truths that punctuate the lives of her characters.
Some of the finest moments come when Gasco brings her talent for dark humour to bear on sad or hopeless situations, for instance one of the aforementioned characters' bleak imaginings of her pregnant mother: "She wore her jeans until they bulged. She drank in dark bars . . . she was flippant with her proteins, fast and loose with her calcium supplements." Elsewhere, particularly in the haunting title story where a young mother becomes irreversibly alienated from her baby daughter, Gasco's evocation of human suffering and anguish makes for deeply unsettling reading.
And the prize for perseverance? The final story - "Mother: Not a True Story" is a brilliant blend of humour, heartbreak and humanity that brings this memorable collection to a suitably dark and enigmatic close.
Catherine Heaney is Notices Editor of Image magazine