September 23, 2007
My Hometown.
Thank you to the Philadelphia Inquirer and thoughtful reviewer, Michelle Reale for this Sunday morning surprise. (I was born there at the University of Pennsylvania Hostpital.)
The pursuit of love, searingly depicted
Famous Fathers
By Pia Z. Ehrhardt
Macadam Cage. 170 pp. $19.50
Reviewed by Michelle Reale
New Orleans author Pia Ehrhardt redefines human relationships in a way that can make a reader flinch, though in a good way. The 11 stories in this inaugural collection are searing in their depiction of the pursuit of love and second chances. One touches on the mystifying and tempestuous relationship between a father and daughter; another on how too much love can sometimes be as damaging as not enough.
Refreshingly, Ehrhardt doesn't string the reader along with inflated prose or over-the-top characterizations. Her stories are clean, sharp-edged, and imbued with honesty. She somehow manages to strike emotional chords by means of characters who are often morally bankrupt. Add to that the resonance that is New Orleans. The city is so trapped in our collective psyche as synonymous with bad luck and devastation, that the mere mention of the place serves as a metaphor for love itself, cracked perhaps, but unbroken.
The title story is narrated by high school senior Katie, who longs for the attention of her very busy and famous father, the mayor of Texadelphia. She befriends two girls in school whose love for their fathers is often a manipulative - and erotic - ploy to get whatever they want. Katie begins to date Larry, a young guy who works for her father, and suddenly gets her father's attention. Blurting out at the dinner table one evening that she has had sex with Larry changes the already fragile dynamic of her family and forces a father to see the reality of his daughter's life in a light most men would rather not.
In "Running the Room," a woman has no qualms about using her married daughter to hide behind while she carries on an affair with a city councilman, leading her daughter to ponder her own marriage in a blasé fashion:
I'm married, I understand what can happen over time, how you run out of new material and repeat yourself, zone out of your own thoughts because they're kind of dull, and so what? You go to bed at night and say, was your day any good, dear, mine was fine, and let's hope tomorrow is like today, and months go by and you lose sight of the fact that you're way out of range, a hundred miles from thrilling.
In "How It Floods," while a hurricane brews in the Gulf, a woman's casual flirtation with a civil engineer concerned about the levee's holding should disaster strike ends in a way she should have foreseen: "Tricky girls find men who trick them." In "Stop," the narrator schools the reader on how to be comforted when love, as it often does, goes frantically, unpredictably, messily awry - or even worse, when the seemingly insurmountably mundane aspects of life force us into going through the motions with love as with everything else.
No one escapes in Ehrhardt's stories: To love is to burn. Still, somehow, Ehrhardt's stories have an aspect of survivability, an "it is what it is" sort of a moral. Love may be flawed, but its pursuit is inevitable. Finding it, whenever or wherever, can make you "remember how rare it is to be loved for a minute like you're new."
Michelle Reale lives in the suburbs.
The pursuit of love, searingly depicted
Famous Fathers
By Pia Z. Ehrhardt
Macadam Cage. 170 pp. $19.50
Reviewed by Michelle Reale
New Orleans author Pia Ehrhardt redefines human relationships in a way that can make a reader flinch, though in a good way. The 11 stories in this inaugural collection are searing in their depiction of the pursuit of love and second chances. One touches on the mystifying and tempestuous relationship between a father and daughter; another on how too much love can sometimes be as damaging as not enough.
Refreshingly, Ehrhardt doesn't string the reader along with inflated prose or over-the-top characterizations. Her stories are clean, sharp-edged, and imbued with honesty. She somehow manages to strike emotional chords by means of characters who are often morally bankrupt. Add to that the resonance that is New Orleans. The city is so trapped in our collective psyche as synonymous with bad luck and devastation, that the mere mention of the place serves as a metaphor for love itself, cracked perhaps, but unbroken.
The title story is narrated by high school senior Katie, who longs for the attention of her very busy and famous father, the mayor of Texadelphia. She befriends two girls in school whose love for their fathers is often a manipulative - and erotic - ploy to get whatever they want. Katie begins to date Larry, a young guy who works for her father, and suddenly gets her father's attention. Blurting out at the dinner table one evening that she has had sex with Larry changes the already fragile dynamic of her family and forces a father to see the reality of his daughter's life in a light most men would rather not.
In "Running the Room," a woman has no qualms about using her married daughter to hide behind while she carries on an affair with a city councilman, leading her daughter to ponder her own marriage in a blasé fashion:
I'm married, I understand what can happen over time, how you run out of new material and repeat yourself, zone out of your own thoughts because they're kind of dull, and so what? You go to bed at night and say, was your day any good, dear, mine was fine, and let's hope tomorrow is like today, and months go by and you lose sight of the fact that you're way out of range, a hundred miles from thrilling.
In "How It Floods," while a hurricane brews in the Gulf, a woman's casual flirtation with a civil engineer concerned about the levee's holding should disaster strike ends in a way she should have foreseen: "Tricky girls find men who trick them." In "Stop," the narrator schools the reader on how to be comforted when love, as it often does, goes frantically, unpredictably, messily awry - or even worse, when the seemingly insurmountably mundane aspects of life force us into going through the motions with love as with everything else.
No one escapes in Ehrhardt's stories: To love is to burn. Still, somehow, Ehrhardt's stories have an aspect of survivability, an "it is what it is" sort of a moral. Love may be flawed, but its pursuit is inevitable. Finding it, whenever or wherever, can make you "remember how rare it is to be loved for a minute like you're new."
Michelle Reale lives in the suburbs.
Labels: Birdsong
August 05, 2007
McSweeney's Recommends.
Books. Also, microwaving cake for 20 seconds, and a hundred other things you might not've known about.
Famous Fathers and Other Stories by Pia Z. Ehrhardt
Readers of the quarterly know Ms. Ehrhardt's stories from Issues 14 and 16, and now there's a whole book of them together in one place, which is very convenient. So emotionally honest you almost want to flinch while you're reading.
God Is Dead by Ron Currie Jr.
This is one of those "linked" story collections. Linking these stories is the question What if God died and people found out? Each story burrows into you and rolls around for days, possibly even weeks, but it hasn't been that long since we devoured the book, so it's hard to say that for sure.
Famous Fathers and Other Stories by Pia Z. Ehrhardt
Readers of the quarterly know Ms. Ehrhardt's stories from Issues 14 and 16, and now there's a whole book of them together in one place, which is very convenient. So emotionally honest you almost want to flinch while you're reading.
God Is Dead by Ron Currie Jr.
This is one of those "linked" story collections. Linking these stories is the question What if God died and people found out? Each story burrows into you and rolls around for days, possibly even weeks, but it hasn't been that long since we devoured the book, so it's hard to say that for sure.
Labels: Birdsong
July 20, 2007
Time Out.
A review from Time Out Chicago:
Ehrhardt's first book is full of stories about women and girls who toy with adultery and indiscretion; a few, as in the titular story, even flirt with father/daughter incest. Her characters, all living in or around New Orleans, are flawed and selfish, and yet it's impossible to avert one's gaze. Each story is like a perfectly wrapped present you didn't know you wanted until you received it.
Ehrhardt's characters are both odd and familiar people; if you secretly aren't them, you probably know them. In "Tell Me in Italian," a daughter who is having an affair with a married man helps her mother catch her husband in his love nest with one of his students. The type of moral dilemmas this situation could present don't weigh on Ehrhardt's characters. They aren't filled with self-loathing or guilt like a good adulterer should be, and that in itself is refreshing. The "bad" women don't come to a worse end; they simply go on living their complicated lives. Stephen Elliott's excellent My Girlfriend Comes to the City and Beats Me Up comes to mind as a comparison, though Ehrhardt is less frank, settling for quietly unsettling.
The antidote for chick lit, Ehrhardt's characters make the same questionable choices again and again. Her beautifully simple and flowing prose guides them through their damaged lives and toward a measure of, if not forgiveness, then understanding. - Beth Dugan
Ehrhardt's first book is full of stories about women and girls who toy with adultery and indiscretion; a few, as in the titular story, even flirt with father/daughter incest. Her characters, all living in or around New Orleans, are flawed and selfish, and yet it's impossible to avert one's gaze. Each story is like a perfectly wrapped present you didn't know you wanted until you received it.
Ehrhardt's characters are both odd and familiar people; if you secretly aren't them, you probably know them. In "Tell Me in Italian," a daughter who is having an affair with a married man helps her mother catch her husband in his love nest with one of his students. The type of moral dilemmas this situation could present don't weigh on Ehrhardt's characters. They aren't filled with self-loathing or guilt like a good adulterer should be, and that in itself is refreshing. The "bad" women don't come to a worse end; they simply go on living their complicated lives. Stephen Elliott's excellent My Girlfriend Comes to the City and Beats Me Up comes to mind as a comparison, though Ehrhardt is less frank, settling for quietly unsettling.
The antidote for chick lit, Ehrhardt's characters make the same questionable choices again and again. Her beautifully simple and flowing prose guides them through their damaged lives and toward a measure of, if not forgiveness, then understanding. - Beth Dugan
Labels: Birdsong
July 16, 2007
The Portland Tribune.
Short stories make you long for more
Ehrhardt pens plots, characters that keep the readers guessing
By ELLISON G. WEIST
The Portland Tribune, Jul 3, 2007
In nearly every one of Pia Z. Ehrhardt's short stories, the women end up with the short end of the stick.
But thanks to Ehrhardt's gift for telling a story, even the most hypersensitive feminist won't bat an eye. They'll be too caught up in the characters and the plots in this debut collection, many of which unfold and flourish over the course of less than eight pages.
The best example of Ehrhardt's mesmerizing brevity is "The Man," a seven-page story that is both brilliant and sickening.
On the face of it, it is the story of a kidnapped woman who is tortured, raped and left for dead. But in spare, heart-rending prose it manages to focus on the relationship the victim hopes to cultivate with the young man who rescued her.
"The doctors had told her that morning that she'd be going home in a few days," Ehrhardt writes. "Lillian didn't know how to thank Doss. A proper thank-you would also be a good-bye and she didn't want to let Doss go. His daily visits were like her morphine."
Offbeat, often dysfunctional family situations abound in several of the stories.
"Running the Room" features a young married woman covering for her middle-age mother who is having an affair.
In "Tell Me in Italian," both the female narrator and her aging father are involved in adulterous relationships, but the father's appears to offer more hope for a future.
His daughter is left worrying about her married lover noting, "I want him to think about me while he sleeps, tossing, turning, and hope he and his small wife aren't tucked in, tight as snow peas."
Not all of Ehrhardt's characters are sympathetic, and that's a good thing.
Often her characters annoy us, like the celebrity-quoting woman in "Intermediate Goals" who starts her story by announcing why she left her husband: "I didn't leave him for another man. I left him for the next man, whom I will be sure to know better, who will know me better, whom I soon hope to meet."
By the end of her tale, we thank God she's not our sister, mother or wife but, boy howdy, it was fun reading about her.
In less than 170 pages Ehrhardt conveys pathos, humor, joy, anger and longing. This collection of short stories marks the author as a talented up-and-comer.
Ehrhardt pens plots, characters that keep the readers guessing
By ELLISON G. WEIST
The Portland Tribune, Jul 3, 2007
In nearly every one of Pia Z. Ehrhardt's short stories, the women end up with the short end of the stick.
But thanks to Ehrhardt's gift for telling a story, even the most hypersensitive feminist won't bat an eye. They'll be too caught up in the characters and the plots in this debut collection, many of which unfold and flourish over the course of less than eight pages.
The best example of Ehrhardt's mesmerizing brevity is "The Man," a seven-page story that is both brilliant and sickening.
On the face of it, it is the story of a kidnapped woman who is tortured, raped and left for dead. But in spare, heart-rending prose it manages to focus on the relationship the victim hopes to cultivate with the young man who rescued her.
"The doctors had told her that morning that she'd be going home in a few days," Ehrhardt writes. "Lillian didn't know how to thank Doss. A proper thank-you would also be a good-bye and she didn't want to let Doss go. His daily visits were like her morphine."
Offbeat, often dysfunctional family situations abound in several of the stories.
"Running the Room" features a young married woman covering for her middle-age mother who is having an affair.
In "Tell Me in Italian," both the female narrator and her aging father are involved in adulterous relationships, but the father's appears to offer more hope for a future.
His daughter is left worrying about her married lover noting, "I want him to think about me while he sleeps, tossing, turning, and hope he and his small wife aren't tucked in, tight as snow peas."
Not all of Ehrhardt's characters are sympathetic, and that's a good thing.
Often her characters annoy us, like the celebrity-quoting woman in "Intermediate Goals" who starts her story by announcing why she left her husband: "I didn't leave him for another man. I left him for the next man, whom I will be sure to know better, who will know me better, whom I soon hope to meet."
By the end of her tale, we thank God she's not our sister, mother or wife but, boy howdy, it was fun reading about her.
In less than 170 pages Ehrhardt conveys pathos, humor, joy, anger and longing. This collection of short stories marks the author as a talented up-and-comer.
Labels: Birdsong
Waking up with the NYT.
This review of FAMOUS FATHERS & OTHER STORIES - and Robin Romm's short story collection, THE MOTHER GARDEN - was/still is one very sweet shock:
July 11, 2007
Books of The Times
Families Lost, and the Ties That Fray
By S. KIRK WALSH
"Writers, to my way of thinking, are no more free in their choices than most people," the author Tobias Wolff once said in a Paris Review interview. "Our material chooses us; certain things engage us, certain things do not." A pair of new writers proves Mr. Wolff's point quite clearly with their debut short-story collections: In "The Mother Garden," Robin Romm explores the loss of a parent who dies young (in most cases, a mother) and in "Famous Fathers & Other Stories," Pia Z. Ehrhardt excavates sexual infidelities and unraveling marriages.
In Ms. Romm's impressive collection of 12 stories, a dead or dying parent is featured in 10 of them. And for the most part she delivers, offering surprising takes on the universal subject. The collection opens with "The Arrival," told from the perspective of Nina, a young woman spending a week with her dying mother and emotionally withdrawn father at a cottage on the rocky coastline of Oregon. "My mother's going to die," the story begins. "This is fact. And there are things that must be done. Last week she instructed us to donate her retirement savings." Hope for remission has long been dashed. "We've gone from hoping for miracle cures to just hoping the sandwiches are good," Nina says of their daily existence.
As is true with many of her stories, Ms. Romm skillfully introduces an element of whimsical surrealism that brings more life - and sadness - to her characters' experiences. In "The Arrival" a young stranger, Gracie, "an oversized Thumbelina," literally washes ashore, and her presence sets off a reach-for-the-Kleenex dynamic within this small family unit doing its best to prepare for pending death.
In the next story, "Lost and Found," a marginal father who had disappeared early in the narrator's life suddenly re-appears in the Arizona desert, naked, with a note that reads: "This is your father. Do as you will." The father moves in with his estranged daughter and settles "into the rhythms of cohabitation."
Their domestic tempo is thrown when the father begins to bring rowdy friends home from a garage where he has found a job. Rising tensions and unspoken disappointments eventually give way to further loss.
In the entertaining title story, the narrator undertakes an unusual experiment of creating a garden of "mothers" to replace the one she lost. "Laurel's the newest arrival," Ms. Romm writes. "She won't behave. 'Don't put me next to Agnes,' she says. 'That heifer.' 'That's mean,' I tell Laurel as I jam her feet into the tilled soil. Her kitten heels make good digging tools and I'm able to get her wedged in deep."
As is often the case with collections, not all the stories succeed. For example, Ms. Romm takes a stab at meta-fiction with "No Small Feat," in which the narrator becomes enraged that her boyfriend uses her dead-mother material to his own literary ends. Unfortunately, this lighthearted story doesn't serve the collection well. This reader prefers Ms. Romm's imaginative stories of mortality rather than a satirical take on her recurring theme.
The subject of loss shifts toward the romantic with Ms. Ehrhardt's collection. Her stories are heavily populated with characters engaging in empty, adulterous affairs that largely lead nowhere. The implicit sadness of these broken relationships resonates further with Ms. Ehrhardt's choice of setting: New Orleans, before the city itself became broken. The reader follows Ms. Ehrhardt's dispirited characters through the lively streets of the French Quarter. The scalloped rooftop of the Superdome perforates the horizon. Sisters jog along the scenic trails of the Tammany Trace.
Surprisingly, one of the less effective stories in this collection is "How It Floods," in which Ms. Ehrhardt takes Hurricane Katrina head-on, portraying an abusive triangle among a seductive woman (an incest survivor, the reader quickly learns), a civil engineer and his boss, hours before the levees break. The despair - of the characters and the city - loses its poignancy when the impending catastrophe takes center stage.
Ms. Ehrhardt's examination of affairs deepens when she brings two generations into these emotional entanglements. For example, in "Tell Me in Italian," Renny confronts her father, who is having an affair with an ex-student who is now a family friend while Renny is involved with her accountant, Mike, who is married with a son. "One part of me wants to compare notes with him, adulterer to adulteress, talk about the tastiness of stolen time, the clean slate for strange foods, intrepid vacations, untried positions ? because who wants the template of another couple's sex?" Ms. Ehrhardt writes from Renny's perspective. "I could talk for days if I forget my mother."
The collection's most successful story, "The Longest Part of the Day," moves between the point of view of 15-year-old Jilly, who goes missing when she takes a ride with Jimmy, the grocery bagger from Piggly Wiggly, and her mother, who is having an affair with her ex-husband's brother. Ms. Ehrhardt deftly captures the repercussions of a narcissistic mother caught in the undertow of her own desires, and the unexpected tenderness that surfaces between Jimmy and Jilly. It's quite amazing what Ms. Ehrhardt accomplishes in a mere 24 pages. It is, in short, a great story.
In "Running the Room," the complexity of mother-daughter relationships is also examined. Gail takes culinary-arts classes at a community college and dreams of opening a restaurant with her mother, who has become distracted by her affair with a city councilman, Eddie Royce. "Some nights I just drive around after class, roll down my windows to catch the sound of sprinklers or the smell of cooking through an open window, and try to see the world in some new way," Gail says about the time before she retrieves her mother from her meetings with Eddie. "Sometimes it works."
With both these collections, the authors offer glimpses into new ways of seeing the world as they write about their chosen subject matter - and sometimes it works.
S. Kirk Walsh is a fiction writer in Austin, Tex.
July 11, 2007
Books of The Times
Families Lost, and the Ties That Fray
By S. KIRK WALSH
"Writers, to my way of thinking, are no more free in their choices than most people," the author Tobias Wolff once said in a Paris Review interview. "Our material chooses us; certain things engage us, certain things do not." A pair of new writers proves Mr. Wolff's point quite clearly with their debut short-story collections: In "The Mother Garden," Robin Romm explores the loss of a parent who dies young (in most cases, a mother) and in "Famous Fathers & Other Stories," Pia Z. Ehrhardt excavates sexual infidelities and unraveling marriages.
In Ms. Romm's impressive collection of 12 stories, a dead or dying parent is featured in 10 of them. And for the most part she delivers, offering surprising takes on the universal subject. The collection opens with "The Arrival," told from the perspective of Nina, a young woman spending a week with her dying mother and emotionally withdrawn father at a cottage on the rocky coastline of Oregon. "My mother's going to die," the story begins. "This is fact. And there are things that must be done. Last week she instructed us to donate her retirement savings." Hope for remission has long been dashed. "We've gone from hoping for miracle cures to just hoping the sandwiches are good," Nina says of their daily existence.
As is true with many of her stories, Ms. Romm skillfully introduces an element of whimsical surrealism that brings more life - and sadness - to her characters' experiences. In "The Arrival" a young stranger, Gracie, "an oversized Thumbelina," literally washes ashore, and her presence sets off a reach-for-the-Kleenex dynamic within this small family unit doing its best to prepare for pending death.
In the next story, "Lost and Found," a marginal father who had disappeared early in the narrator's life suddenly re-appears in the Arizona desert, naked, with a note that reads: "This is your father. Do as you will." The father moves in with his estranged daughter and settles "into the rhythms of cohabitation."
Their domestic tempo is thrown when the father begins to bring rowdy friends home from a garage where he has found a job. Rising tensions and unspoken disappointments eventually give way to further loss.
In the entertaining title story, the narrator undertakes an unusual experiment of creating a garden of "mothers" to replace the one she lost. "Laurel's the newest arrival," Ms. Romm writes. "She won't behave. 'Don't put me next to Agnes,' she says. 'That heifer.' 'That's mean,' I tell Laurel as I jam her feet into the tilled soil. Her kitten heels make good digging tools and I'm able to get her wedged in deep."
As is often the case with collections, not all the stories succeed. For example, Ms. Romm takes a stab at meta-fiction with "No Small Feat," in which the narrator becomes enraged that her boyfriend uses her dead-mother material to his own literary ends. Unfortunately, this lighthearted story doesn't serve the collection well. This reader prefers Ms. Romm's imaginative stories of mortality rather than a satirical take on her recurring theme.
The subject of loss shifts toward the romantic with Ms. Ehrhardt's collection. Her stories are heavily populated with characters engaging in empty, adulterous affairs that largely lead nowhere. The implicit sadness of these broken relationships resonates further with Ms. Ehrhardt's choice of setting: New Orleans, before the city itself became broken. The reader follows Ms. Ehrhardt's dispirited characters through the lively streets of the French Quarter. The scalloped rooftop of the Superdome perforates the horizon. Sisters jog along the scenic trails of the Tammany Trace.
Surprisingly, one of the less effective stories in this collection is "How It Floods," in which Ms. Ehrhardt takes Hurricane Katrina head-on, portraying an abusive triangle among a seductive woman (an incest survivor, the reader quickly learns), a civil engineer and his boss, hours before the levees break. The despair - of the characters and the city - loses its poignancy when the impending catastrophe takes center stage.
Ms. Ehrhardt's examination of affairs deepens when she brings two generations into these emotional entanglements. For example, in "Tell Me in Italian," Renny confronts her father, who is having an affair with an ex-student who is now a family friend while Renny is involved with her accountant, Mike, who is married with a son. "One part of me wants to compare notes with him, adulterer to adulteress, talk about the tastiness of stolen time, the clean slate for strange foods, intrepid vacations, untried positions ? because who wants the template of another couple's sex?" Ms. Ehrhardt writes from Renny's perspective. "I could talk for days if I forget my mother."
The collection's most successful story, "The Longest Part of the Day," moves between the point of view of 15-year-old Jilly, who goes missing when she takes a ride with Jimmy, the grocery bagger from Piggly Wiggly, and her mother, who is having an affair with her ex-husband's brother. Ms. Ehrhardt deftly captures the repercussions of a narcissistic mother caught in the undertow of her own desires, and the unexpected tenderness that surfaces between Jimmy and Jilly. It's quite amazing what Ms. Ehrhardt accomplishes in a mere 24 pages. It is, in short, a great story.
In "Running the Room," the complexity of mother-daughter relationships is also examined. Gail takes culinary-arts classes at a community college and dreams of opening a restaurant with her mother, who has become distracted by her affair with a city councilman, Eddie Royce. "Some nights I just drive around after class, roll down my windows to catch the sound of sprinklers or the smell of cooking through an open window, and try to see the world in some new way," Gail says about the time before she retrieves her mother from her meetings with Eddie. "Sometimes it works."
With both these collections, the authors offer glimpses into new ways of seeing the world as they write about their chosen subject matter - and sometimes it works.
S. Kirk Walsh is a fiction writer in Austin, Tex.
Labels: Birdsong
June 22, 2007
Myfanwy Collins.
Her June 22nd review of Famous Fathers:
"Like the levees we are all so familiar with now in the post-Katrina world, if you make the wrong move, if you push her too far, the woman will break free. She will flood her restraints - she will take over your streets, your house. She will send you fleeing from the city you love. But she doesn't do this in these stories - she keeps herself as much in check as she can stand. And why? Well, for love. Love is the ultimate prize, the gift. She will do just about anything for love - and truthfully she finds getting it from men easy enough." more
"Like the levees we are all so familiar with now in the post-Katrina world, if you make the wrong move, if you push her too far, the woman will break free. She will flood her restraints - she will take over your streets, your house. She will send you fleeing from the city you love. But she doesn't do this in these stories - she keeps herself as much in check as she can stand. And why? Well, for love. Love is the ultimate prize, the gift. She will do just about anything for love - and truthfully she finds getting it from men easy enough." more
Labels: Birdsong
June 20, 2007
Hometown Press: Times Picayune.
Giving chase
New Orleans writer Pia Z. Ehrhardt tackles female desire with gusto
Sunday, June 17, 2007
By Susan Larson
Book editor - Times Picayune
FAMOUS FATHERS & OTHER STORIES
All readers recognize it when they hear it -- the siren song of the truth teller, the voice that will lead you someplace new, summoning you to an experience that may be dangerous and will certainly be unforgettable. And once you've heard it, that voice, you're along for the ride, wherever it goes, listening, seduced. The stories in Pia Z. Ehrhardt's "Famous Fathers & Other Stories" have that powerful allure.
In "Running the Room," the opening story in this collection, the narrator, Beck, is aiding and abetting her mother in a love affair with a city councilman. She's not only along for the ride, she's driving the getaway car. "Since I was a kid," she says, "I've always hated going to the airport just to deliver and fetch. I'm always ready to fly."
And that's what draws the reader to these characters -- they're always ready to rocket into the unknown at warp speed, always ready to break the boundaries, cross the lines. Whether it's a woman having an affair with her husband's brother, a daughter who's using her mother's love affair as a cover for her own night of exploring the unknown, or a wife who's jealous of her husband's affection for her sister -- these are women at the edge, ready to take that step. Brave or foolhardy? Who can say? But always interesting. What would it be like to live as if you had nothing to lose?
Ehrhardt, a native New Orleanian, sets many of her stories here. In "Running the Room," the mother's love affair is conducted at the Airport Hilton, with detours to Bourbon Street, while her daughter attends classes at Delgado in preparation for opening a restaurant. There's a detour to Pat O'Brien's complete with "vacationing fools." In "How It Floods," a woman has an affair with a man who works for the levee board as a hurricane approaches in the background; "I like men who know things," she says. And in "Intermediate Goals," the protagonist, Carrie, leaves her husband -- not for "another man," but for "the next man." She signs up to be an Angola Angel, consults with a voodoo priestess on North Rampart Street, gets a tattoo. But New Orleans, in these stories, is simply -- and refreshingly -- a fact of life, glass beads tossed in a closet somewhere else, at times. Ehrhardt's characters, not her setting, are what the reader must reckon with.
In these stories, we meet the women we often wonder about, certainly the ones we like to talk about. What's it like to go off and leave your three children behind with your husband? What will happen if you step into that car, thinking you're taking a ride to school, and end up a state away with a bagger from the Piggly Wiggly? What will your father the mayor think if you have an affair with his driver? What if you did really have an affair with a guy from the AA meeting? What would the next morning's conversation sound like? What is the cost of forgiveness? Higher than what you might think.
In the title story, when the young girl confesses her affair with her father's driver, she grabs her sister's camera to capture the moment. "I want to take the pictures for a change. I've made history because I will never say anything worse. Sex was my last true weapon, a big, dumb club, so easy to use. I hold out the camera, and there they are, smaller and stopped. Click: My mother's anger. Click: My father's fear. Click: My sister's delight. We are the Jacksons at dinner, stirred up like wasps, and I've made a big mistake."
Then there's that choice of the perfect tattoo -- "the word 'oh' written -- ohohohohohohohoho -- in a bracelet around my right wrist, because it looks like surprise, doubt, and laughing all at the same time." That's the heady cocktail in these stories, the joy of the wish fulfilled with a chaser of doubt.
Female desire -- for sex, for power -- is a tricky subject, but Ehrhardt doesn't romanticize that sense of yearning, that lust for what you want when you want it, that itchy, urgent need to see what happens next -- and not just to see it happen, but to make it happen. She celebrates that power, explores its truths. Her stories will leave you breathless and wanting more. Now.
. . . . . . .
New Orleans writer Pia Z. Ehrhardt tackles female desire with gusto
Sunday, June 17, 2007
By Susan Larson
Book editor - Times Picayune
FAMOUS FATHERS & OTHER STORIES
All readers recognize it when they hear it -- the siren song of the truth teller, the voice that will lead you someplace new, summoning you to an experience that may be dangerous and will certainly be unforgettable. And once you've heard it, that voice, you're along for the ride, wherever it goes, listening, seduced. The stories in Pia Z. Ehrhardt's "Famous Fathers & Other Stories" have that powerful allure.
In "Running the Room," the opening story in this collection, the narrator, Beck, is aiding and abetting her mother in a love affair with a city councilman. She's not only along for the ride, she's driving the getaway car. "Since I was a kid," she says, "I've always hated going to the airport just to deliver and fetch. I'm always ready to fly."
And that's what draws the reader to these characters -- they're always ready to rocket into the unknown at warp speed, always ready to break the boundaries, cross the lines. Whether it's a woman having an affair with her husband's brother, a daughter who's using her mother's love affair as a cover for her own night of exploring the unknown, or a wife who's jealous of her husband's affection for her sister -- these are women at the edge, ready to take that step. Brave or foolhardy? Who can say? But always interesting. What would it be like to live as if you had nothing to lose?
Ehrhardt, a native New Orleanian, sets many of her stories here. In "Running the Room," the mother's love affair is conducted at the Airport Hilton, with detours to Bourbon Street, while her daughter attends classes at Delgado in preparation for opening a restaurant. There's a detour to Pat O'Brien's complete with "vacationing fools." In "How It Floods," a woman has an affair with a man who works for the levee board as a hurricane approaches in the background; "I like men who know things," she says. And in "Intermediate Goals," the protagonist, Carrie, leaves her husband -- not for "another man," but for "the next man." She signs up to be an Angola Angel, consults with a voodoo priestess on North Rampart Street, gets a tattoo. But New Orleans, in these stories, is simply -- and refreshingly -- a fact of life, glass beads tossed in a closet somewhere else, at times. Ehrhardt's characters, not her setting, are what the reader must reckon with.
In these stories, we meet the women we often wonder about, certainly the ones we like to talk about. What's it like to go off and leave your three children behind with your husband? What will happen if you step into that car, thinking you're taking a ride to school, and end up a state away with a bagger from the Piggly Wiggly? What will your father the mayor think if you have an affair with his driver? What if you did really have an affair with a guy from the AA meeting? What would the next morning's conversation sound like? What is the cost of forgiveness? Higher than what you might think.
In the title story, when the young girl confesses her affair with her father's driver, she grabs her sister's camera to capture the moment. "I want to take the pictures for a change. I've made history because I will never say anything worse. Sex was my last true weapon, a big, dumb club, so easy to use. I hold out the camera, and there they are, smaller and stopped. Click: My mother's anger. Click: My father's fear. Click: My sister's delight. We are the Jacksons at dinner, stirred up like wasps, and I've made a big mistake."
Then there's that choice of the perfect tattoo -- "the word 'oh' written -- ohohohohohohohoho -- in a bracelet around my right wrist, because it looks like surprise, doubt, and laughing all at the same time." That's the heady cocktail in these stories, the joy of the wish fulfilled with a chaser of doubt.
Female desire -- for sex, for power -- is a tricky subject, but Ehrhardt doesn't romanticize that sense of yearning, that lust for what you want when you want it, that itchy, urgent need to see what happens next -- and not just to see it happen, but to make it happen. She celebrates that power, explores its truths. Her stories will leave you breathless and wanting more. Now.
. . . . . . .
Labels: Birdsong
May 31, 2007
Tom Jenks.
Pia Ehrhardt's compassion for the sorrows of love springs from a sensuous
heart and a mind quickened to truth. Her stories travel the road of desire,
with a generosity of wit that makes a reader eager, a bit breathless, and in
the end grateful for the journey.
--Tom Jenks, editor, Narrative Magazine
heart and a mind quickened to truth. Her stories travel the road of desire,
with a generosity of wit that makes a reader eager, a bit breathless, and in
the end grateful for the journey.
--Tom Jenks, editor, Narrative Magazine
Labels: Birdsong
Karen Russell.
Pia Z's stories will break your heart in the best way imaginable. I actually gasped aloud several times while reading this astonishing collection--it's that brave, that funny, that shocking, that good.
--Karen Russell, author of St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves
--Karen Russell, author of St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves
Labels: Birdsong
Lacy Crawford.
Pia Z. Ehrhardt won the 2005 Narrative Prize for her story "Famous Fathers," the title story of this collection. (The story is available in our Archive.) As a writer, Ehrhardt lived a little before turning to the page, and her experience as a wife, mother, daughter, and keen observer shows in her debut. In this collection she is concerned with the way women of all ages struggle to move beyond their childhood families and accept the choices they've made as adults - or to make new ones. "I'd like to remind them he's just a man," says the teenage protagonist of "Famous Fathers," speaking of her father, the mayor; "but his office impresses me too." Most of the young women in this collection are impressed by the office of fatherhood, and the fathers tend to abuse this privilege by crossing subtle but powerful boundaries of intimacy with their daughters. Handling these transgressions, while admitting to their own longing, ties the girls up in knots. They are savvy enough to recognize the offense but powerless to keep it from emerging in their own fledgling attempts to reach out beyond the family toward partnerships of their own. The push-pull of the desire to be close to a man and the fear they learned at their parents' feet keep the prose tense with reversals and the plotlines alive with revelations. These are lean stories, swift and surprising in the way they refuse to settle the reader's expectations: more often than not, the protagonist - wife, mother - wants something more than what she has. The force of their desire is frustrating, endearing, and true.
On occasion, the narrator looks around the room, and Ehrhardt has a gift for lucid description that has the hyperreal effect of a still life, causing one to recognize the elegance of an ordinary thing. It's the mark of a natural storyteller, the lightest touch to remind you that she has set you down in a world that is completely real and utterly gifted to the reader till the story?s end.
L. C. - Narrative Magazine?s First & Second Looks
On occasion, the narrator looks around the room, and Ehrhardt has a gift for lucid description that has the hyperreal effect of a still life, causing one to recognize the elegance of an ordinary thing. It's the mark of a natural storyteller, the lightest touch to remind you that she has set you down in a world that is completely real and utterly gifted to the reader till the story?s end.
L. C. - Narrative Magazine?s First & Second Looks
Labels: Birdsong
May 01, 2007
Jim Shepard
Pia Ehrhardt's tender and funny stories are filled with passionate women just barely bottled up by their everyday responsibilities: busy-hearted wives and mothers who may find themselves surprised by love or their own resiliency but who never doubted for a moment the intensity of their desire to touch the world. They experience their lives as tunnels to negotiate before the payoff of so much space. They render for us that jumping-on-a-trampoline feeling, when our most intimate connections are the top of the bounce, and the view up there is both scary and sweet.
Jim Shepard, author of Project X and Love and Hydrogen
Jim Shepard, author of Project X and Love and Hydrogen
Labels: Birdsong
Fredrick Barthelme
Pia Z. Ehrhardt's Famous Fathers is a stunning first collection. The
stories charm and tease and threaten with equal fervor. Ehrhardt's narrators
are always a little bit in heat, open to love's every fleeting attention and
intent on having and being pleasured by their moments of grace or disgrace.
From "Running the Room," in which a daughter helps her mother with a little
spirited indiscretion, to a breathtaking moment in "How It Floods" when a
father's attentions to his daughter linger at the edge of incest, these are
stories that tempt the heart like no others. To read them is to be seduced,
at night and in the slanting rain, in a new city, over quiet water, by the
woman of your dreams.
Frederick Barthelme, author of Moon Deluxe and Bob the Gambler
stories charm and tease and threaten with equal fervor. Ehrhardt's narrators
are always a little bit in heat, open to love's every fleeting attention and
intent on having and being pleasured by their moments of grace or disgrace.
From "Running the Room," in which a daughter helps her mother with a little
spirited indiscretion, to a breathtaking moment in "How It Floods" when a
father's attentions to his daughter linger at the edge of incest, these are
stories that tempt the heart like no others. To read them is to be seduced,
at night and in the slanting rain, in a new city, over quiet water, by the
woman of your dreams.
Frederick Barthelme, author of Moon Deluxe and Bob the Gambler
Labels: Birdsong
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