Elissa Schappell's collection of short stories, "Blueprints for Building Better Girls," released in September, provides a fiercely honest and darkly witty glimpse into the lives of women from the 1970s to the present day. Tied together by its bold language and cynical tone, Schappell's narrative shatters stereotypical portrayals of female archetypes such as the goody two-shoes, the party girl, the unhappy wife and the overbearing mother.
Each of the eight stories is told from the point of view of a different woman, and the women are linked to each other in subtle ways. Some women reappear in later stories, but at different ages and in different contexts. Charlotte appears as a rape victim in one story and as an uncertain mother in another. Heather's sagas bookend "Blueprints," as she appears as a promiscuous adolescent in the first story and a mother revealing a haunting secret from her past to her young son in the last story.
The women in Schappell's stories defy cookie-cutter stereotypes. Each of the women in "Blueprints" is strikingly complex and authentic. For example, in "Monsters of the Deep," a high school-age Heather watches ocean life documentaries while apathetically having sex. Schappell intersperses quotations from the documentary commentator ("Architeuthis is an elusive creature") with Heather's descriptions of the sexual atmosphere: "Ross lifts my hips and I think how great it is that there are no footprints on the ocean floor. There are still places man can't go." One would be hard-pressed to find a character like Heather in most other books.
Schappell places her fascinating characters within surprisingly casual contexts, carefully interweaving weighty themes about the human experience into scenes of everyday life. In "Are You Comfortable?" Schappell paints a hauntingly touching scene in which a college girl tells her elderly grandfather that she was raped while she helps him use the bathroom. In "The Joy of Cooking," a mother confronts her daughter's battle with anorexia and her own approach to mothering while helping her daughter cook a chicken over the phone. The understated way by which Schappell depicts how the narrators ponder their own life events in casual, everyday settings adds elegance to her work.
Although I found Schappell's stories oppressively dark at times almost all of the women in the book are plagued with a serious issue such as anorexia, rape, infertility or alcohol abuse her dark humor often tempers the disturbing effects of the grim subject matter. In "A Dog Story," the narrator feels pressured by her mother to have a baby: "You know you can't have just one,' my mother said, as though babies were peanuts." In "Are You Comfortable," Charlotte writes, "Nobody ever came back from Assisted Living. Her mother thought it might as well be called Assisted Dying." In "Elephant," two young mothers drink wine out of a Hello Kitty thermos in the park. It's these I-shouldn't-find-this-funny moments that draw readers into Schappell's otherwise bleak plots.
"Blueprints for Building Better Girls" is a thoughtful and clever portrayal of the complex and ever-changing meaning of womanhood in the 20th and 21st centuries. The short stories remind readers, as Heather tells her son in the last line of the final story, "Don't be a fool, there is no such thing as just a girl."
