Stories to Hide from Your Mother

Britta Santowski is a freelance writer in Victoria, British Columbia.

“Subversive” is almost too clichéd a term to describe this
extraordinary collection of stories. Tess Fragoulis tackles the tired
genre with refreshingly new language. The book opens with a letter
titled “Exhortations,” an appeal to the “Gentle Bureaucrats” for
funding. Included are the gangly experiences of puberty, sex dreams
about a famous film director (”who shall remain nameless, and should
not be confused with the person who wrote my letter of
recommendation”), the mandatory writerly sentencing to
“self-loathing and despair,” and the risk of teetering toward
insanity.

Reality merges with thought and memory in “Swan Dive,” in which
“[l]ife turns into art because of boredom” and a suicide becomes a
porn star’s grand finale. In “Peanut Butter, Figs, and Swollen
Lips,” fantasy madly wraps itself around reality as a woman imagines a
nympholeptic encounter with a 16-year-old boy. In “Day Two Lasts
Twenty-Four Hours,” Domina, a vegetarian, entertains thoughts of
eating her children in order to better cope with menstruation. And a
tale of rape, “Ankle-Deep in Moonlight,” scrutinizes the experiences
of a young girl. Throughout, the political and the personal merge in a
way that threatens to eradicate the latter.

Fragoulis uses language like a knife, slicing through flimsy surfaces
and exposing profound alternative perspectives. My only regret is that
the collection came to an end, but I take comfort in knowing that
revisiting these stories will renew my fascination.