When I read Paige Clark’s She Is Haunted, I was by turns delighted and moved: delighted because Clark takes obvious care and joy in crafting her sentences, and moved because her stories approach life’s mysteries with such emotional honesty. Many different Elizabeths appear throughout the stories in the collection. In “Times I’ve Wanted to Be You,” a widow named Beth wears her husband’s clothes, wishing to turn into him. In the freewheeling sci-fi “Amygdala,” an Eliza has her left frontal cortex removed to better survive climate change. These Elizabeths confront various versions of intimacy and loss, each making a devastating discovery about “[t]he whole charade that a woman could ever belong to herself.” While the characters often surprise, they are never quirky for quirky’s sake.
She Is Haunted was first published by Allen & Unwin, an independent press in Australia, where it was shortlisted for the 2021 Readings Prize for New Australian Fiction and longlisted for the 2022 Stella Prize. Clark lives in Melbourne, where she is working toward her PhD, studying the relationship between race, craft, and the teaching of creative writing. While reading Clark’s stories, published in a U.S. edition by Two Dollar Radio in May, I had the impression of stepping out from behind a screen of trees and approaching a cliff from which, if I looked carefully, I could discern the outline of my own home. In other words, reading her suffused me with the wonder of approaching my life from an unexpected angle, leaving me awestruck but also disturbed. It is a perspective art uniquely provides. We all need it, from time to time.
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Literary MagNet
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