The stories in Lucy Nelson’s debut collection, Wait Here, are delicate and quiet, focused on the experiences of women across many stages of their lives. They are often interior, full of dreams and desires and yearnings: some of these women are drawn towards futures they don’t quite understand, others circle around past experiences and regrets, or grapple with their present-day realities and disappointments.
Nelson’s characters are complex, and wonderfully varied, but what they have in common – and what forms the thematic heart of the book – is that none of them have children.
Nelson has a remarkable ability to hold this connection lightly: for each of these women, their childlessness is one fact among many; it is very rarely the central or defining feature of their stories, and never of their lives. Some of them have chosen to be childless; others have had the decision made for them, by other people, by their bodies, or by forces beyond their control. All of them feel their childlessness differently – and to different degrees. For some it is important, for others, it is something they barely consider at all.
This is all the more impressive because it is still unusual to see childlessness depicted in this way – as one decision in the many choices that make up a life, and as something neither triumphant nor tragic, but complex and multivalent, and always deeply individual.
One woman, for example, learns as a teenager that she is infertile, but it doesn’t “occur to [her] to be upset” – this is just one of the many ways that a body can assert itself or shape a life. Another terminates a pregnancy – a decision that takes “Heart. Pragmatism. Kindness. Reality. Honesty” – and then finds herself listening to Mummy podcasts and imagining a “ghost baby” accompanying her days, with ever-increasing intensity. A third relishes her solitude, and has always felt estranged from family life, but is learning how to make close connections of other kinds.
Many of these stories examine different models of family and kinship, and different kinds of love. Several characters do the work of mothering to children who are not their own – including the main character of the story Father Figure who lives with her sister and small niece, and is intensely invested and engaged in both their lives. Others seek out families built “out of adults”, as the narrator of Ariel. Marvin. I Don’t Want a Boyfriend puts it, as she surrounds herself with “almighty platonic love[s]”; or find in a few close, long-held relationships intimate companionship, shared rhythms and rituals, and genuine succour and support.
This is not to say that none of these characters are lonely, or grieve for the children they have not had, or who did not live. The stories where loss and longing dominate are tenderly told, and some of the most affecting. Yet even their characters find ways to live alongside their sorrow, often pushing against convention as they find freedoms and pleasures – and meaning – in places different to what they expected of their lives.
Nelson’s stories are remarkably varied in tone and style, often experimenting with structure and forms of narration. Many of her characters have distinct and quirky voices – her younger characters in particular are acerbic and hilarious – and the collection as a whole is wide-ranging and extremely generous in its purview and thinking.
These are assured and deeply compassionate stories, that embrace emotional complexity and are always fiercely embodied, attuned to many different ways to shape a family and a life.
Wait Here by Lucy Nelson is out now (Simon & Schuster, $32.99)
