Review: Jenny Irish
On Jenny Irish’s I Am Faithful
by Tyler Truman Julian
Writing anytime is challenging. Writing in a pandemic is its own animal. Anyone who has been able to write and publish in 2020 has earned my admiration, and many of The Shore’s contributors have released new work, sent books to the printer, and completed fantastic virtual readings over the last few months. I speak for the whole Shore crew when I say, I hope this brief introduction serves as my sincere applause to the artists and creators of all stripes who have made time for their work amid this year’s uncertainty and strangeness, and for those of us struggling to write right now, we see you too. The words will come, and we are waiting for them.
Jenny Irish is one of the many contributors that could be listed above. Her short story collection, I Am Faithful, came out this spring from Black Lawrence Press, the home of her 2017 poetry collection Common Ancestor, and because of the pandemic has not receive the attention it so rightly deserves. I Am Faithful is a powerful, timely collection that interrogates the intersections of gender and poverty. Irish’s heroes and antiheroes are women living paycheck to paycheck, women navigating relationships, women thriving in creative, unorthodox ways. This collection seems primed for 2020. Many of these stories wrestle with the pressing questions of this election, but like all good art, they rarely give us black and white answers, a yes or a no. In this way, Irish effectively creates a believable world with relatable and moving characters. In this collection, she has captured the essential worker, the neighbor, the survivor that society has forgotten to check in on. Irish has offered a glimpse into this complicated reality, without pandering to any sort of story that invites an outside savior in, that takes agency from her main characters.
These slice of life narratives are fresh and nuanced, challenging and tightly written. I thought I’d blow through them in a type of breathless awe, but instead, Irish’s stories asked me to slow, to sit with her characters, and be present in the struggle, witness to it. This collection burns with the cool light of great independent film, the tight feminist view of a Kelly Reichardt film, the seedy, character driven arc of Debra Granik’s Winter’s Bone, the cinematic imagery and humor of something like Michael Lehmann’s Heathers. I Am Faithful is as beautiful as it is real, and the descriptions used to set up its scenes show Irish’s ability to draw up worlds truer than our own. In the story, “Glass,” for example, Irish describes the neighborhood where her narrator lives, revealing more about the character than the surroundings, while skillfully painting an immersive picture for the reader to collapse into. She writes,
There’s one home completely surrounded by a hedge of pink bleeding hearts. They’ve forgotten they’re only flowers. There comes a point though, where under the weight of a thousand of heart shaped petals the stalks fold over and flowers spill onto the sidewalk. The wind blows them through the streets. It’s like magic, something so pink behaving itself so badly. (I Am Faithful, 77)
There’s something tragic in this description, something invigorating. The narrator of “Glass” is somewhere between girlhood and adulthood, reflecting on the strange freedom of children in a do-it-yourself glassworks shop, even as she struggles with depression and the loss of a friend by suicide. As she gazes at the building, she wishes it would burst into flames, but of course, this does not happen. Her wishes, her desires tied inextricably to her friend’s death and her life on the poverty line, never come to fruition. The narrator tells us, “Expectations should be met like walls. Sometimes you can go up and over, and sometimes you can bust right through, but the rest of the time, which is most of the time, you hit them full-force, head-on” (I Am Faithful, 80). This is Irish’s narrator in “Glass,” but it is also the main character of each of these stories: dogged and alone, but fiercely so. Each character is new, each story is nuanced, but so much rests on these walls, the desire to bust through them.
Jenny Irish’s short stories in I Am Faithful pick up where Common Ancestor left up, and, though fiction, they are no less confessional, no less lyrical, no less intricately woven into a narrative web. These stories occur at the intersection of poetry and prose, beauty and horror, tragedy and comedy. These stories defy categorization as they interrogate family, violence, love, and growth; they offer no easy answers. In painting real life, life at the margins, these stories find their power.