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Corrie Pikul

Valerie Trueblood’s New Book Nails the Messiness of Ordinary Lives

by  Corrie Pikul | 

Photo: Counterpoint

In her outstanding new collection of short stories, Marry or Burn, Valerie Trueblood uses the threads of familiar topics—love, marriage, separation, general angst—to spin affecting, utterly unexpected yarns. There are first dates, broken hearts, unlooked-for affairs, and of course weddings (brides and grooms figure prominently in five of the 12 stories)—but Trueblood has completely rewritten the script for each of these everyday events.

People who cheat on their spouses or lose their first loves or their firstborn share these truths with their children—not in dramatic confessionals, but in the manner of parents passing along family history. A married woman finds herself fantasizing about her friend’s husband—a charismatic, generous man who’s dying from lymphoma. A disastrous affair between a teenager and her now-institutionalized history teacher’s related to us from the perspective of the girl’s aunt. A divorced doctor, while recovering from the recent death of his tempestuous lover, accidentally catches his ex-wife’s boyfriend with another woman.

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