Confidence

Linda M. Bayley is a freelance writer based in Sudbury, Ontario. She is
the author of Estrangement: Poems.

On the front cover of this book is a photo of a little girl dressed in
red, white figure skates slung over her shoulder, looking back at the
camera with a big grin on her face. That picture says so much about what
life should be like: happy, fun, and full of certainty.

In the loosely linked stories between the covers, though, life is
anything but. We see it through the eyes of a number of women: Alice,
whose older sister “set the rules for what was normal” through her
unpredictability and the occasional hunger strike; Angela, the sister
herself, who ran away to Los Angeles in search of her mother, wearing a
bikini top and a parka for her trip on the Greyhound; Phoenix,
Angela’s daughter, who was sent to live with her Aunt Alice at the age
of 11 or so and never really got to know her mother.

Other characters skirt the periphery of these three lives, their
stories woven together so that each is connected to another in some way
large or small, each exploring life from a different perspective, each
with different ideas about whether the lives of these women have been
failures or successes. In the end, it seems, the ones with the most
confidence are the ones who get ahead, even if it’s just in their own
minds.

Melanie Little’s writing throughout this collection is clear and
beautiful. She connects the minor characters casually, quietly,
sometimes offering new insight into a person’s life dozens of pages
after their own story is told. It is as natural as the real-world
intersection of life with life, full of chance meetings and overheard
remarks. If the author lacks anything in the telling of these stories,
it is clearly not confidence.