The stories in Some Day This Will Be Funny marry memory to moment in a
union of narrative form as immaculate and imperfect as the characters
damned to act them out on page. Lynne Tillman, author of American
Genius, presides over the ceremony; Clarence Thomas, Marvin Gaye, and
Madame Realism mingle at the reception. Narrators - by turn infamous and
nameless - shift within their own skin, struggling to unknot
reminiscence from reality while scenes rush into warm focus, then cool,
twist, and snap in the breeze of shifting thought. Epistle, quotation,
and haiku bounce between lyrical passages of lucid beauty, echoing the
scattered, cycling arpeggio of Tillman's preferred subject: the
unsettled mind. Collectively, these stories own a conscience shaped by
oaths made and broken; by the skeleton silence and secrets of family; by
love's shifting chartreuse. They traffic in the quiet images of personal
history, each one a flickering sacrament in danger of being swallowed up
by the lust and desperation of their possessor: a fistful of parking
tickets shoved in the glove compartment, a little black book hidden from
a wife in a safe-deposit box, a planter stuffed with flowers to keep out
the cooing mourning doves. They are stories fashioned with candor and
animated by fits of wordplay and invention - stories that affirm
Tillman's unshakable talent for wedding the patterns and rituals of
thought with the blushing immediacy of existence, defying genre and
defining experimental short fiction.
