Review: Unsaid Things
Joanna Acevedo 196 pages Flexible Press (2021)
Read this if you like: Jennifer Wortman, Susan Minot, Alice Munroe
tl;dr summary: Glimpses in the lives of thirteen people who are all very bad at love each in their own unique way.
I’ve heard people give the advice that main characters in stories should be likable, but I don’t think I always agree with that. The characters in stories should be relatable. And the thing is, while we would all like to relate to being likable people, sometimes we’re just…not. Part of being human is that most of us can relate to making mistakes and bad decisions, or otherwise sometimes not living up to the best version of ourselves.
That’s the first thing I appreciated about the stories in Unsaid Things. Some of the narrators actually are quite likable; most of them are at least sympathetic. But some of them are more obviously the asshole in the depicted situation, and Acevedo sets that tone right away in “Loss Can Be Gradual or All at Once”, the story that kicks off the collection. Its narrator, Shandy, is a codependent compulsive liar, showing the reader her on-again-off-again cycle with Alex. This story defies another golden rule of storytelling in that neither Shandy nor her circumstances change from start to end—but that’s kind of the point: the cycle will continue because that’s who this character is. What really keeps the reader hooked in and reading, though, is the voice. It has just the right amount of humor, in just the right places. Most importantly, it reads authentically like this is a real person, telling a real story.
That’s a trait that every story in this collection shares—not the humor, necessarily, though many of the narrators are at least witty, if not outright funny. But all of the stories have a voice that suits the story and adds something to the enjoyment of it. In “Sleeping with the Kinds of Boys Who Wouldn’t Talk to Me in High School”, for instance, the voice has this disaffected, almost clinical lack of emotion that gives the narrator more freedom to linger on painful moments without them feeling overwrought, and it perfectly matches the character: a successful but unhappy model, looking back on her childhood when she was bullied for being tall.
I would definitely recommend this collection to anyone who’s working on perfecting their first-person voice. It checks all the boxes at a craft level, with excellent consistency and balance between the narration and dialogue, and great use of vivid, unique details that characterize each story’s narrator at the same time they fill in the world or advance the plot.
Now, while the first-person voice is well-written in all of these stories, I was personally looking for just a smidge more variety across the collection. While there are two third-person stories (“Trying to Escape the Inevitable” and “Unsaid Things”), the other eleven are first-person, and the voices and narrators, though distinct, are similar. I could have done with a couple more palate cleansers in there—another story in third-person, maybe, or a drastically different viewpoint character. That said, I was also reading the collection straight through over just a couple of reading sessions. The feeling of sameness might not have been so pronounced if I were stretching the reading out over a longer period.
Thematically, the stories in this collection are kind of like a prism. They explore a similar set of emotions and relationships, but from different angles and perspectives. For instance, the second story (“Visiting Hours”) also centers on a character who resists change, but it’s the narrator’s friend, Mac, rather than the narrator, who takes more the role of witness telling the story than centering herself. “Inertia” takes a slant approach to this concept, with a narrator who can’t get over an unrequited love. Then, in “Where You End and I Begin”, a narrator is similarly trapped, this time by a self-destructive lifestyle that’s symbolized by the house where she ends up living—though, in that one, the reader gets a different resolution.
If I were pressed to pick my favorite story in Unsaid Things, I think that honor would have to go to “Systematic Incompatibilities”. The narrator for this story is 35, married, and absolutely does not want a baby; she stays on her birth control even though her husband, Louis, thinks she’s trying to get pregnant. To me, this story does the best job of showing the narrator’s motivations and making the reader root for her, even though she’s making what is arguably a shitty decision by deceiving Louis instead of just having the hard conversation she’s avoiding. It’s a perfect example of what I mentioned in the beginning of the review, about characters who are relatable even when they’re not likable, and any writers who want to achieve that kind of complexity with their narrators should definitely give Unsaid Things a read.
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