Love

Romantic yearning and dysfunction are recurring themes throughout this story collection, and the narratives illustrate these concepts in such a way as to highlight their underlying pain and humanity. For example, “The Shared Patio” follows a woman who harbors romantic feelings for her married neighbor. Due to this yearning, she constructs various fantasies and connections between herself and the neighbor. For example, she fixates on their tangentially related professions as something that might exclude the neighbor’s wife: “If Helena had come out, we would have had to stop using our industry lingo so that she could understand us” (5). The narrative does not necessarily condone the protagonist’s fantasies towards a married man, but her underlying loneliness and longing are largely portrayed as understandable, sympathetic, and deeply human.

“Mon Plaisir” presents a similar portrait of romantic despair, but through the dissolution of an established relationship rather...