Author flips lid off ordinary-looking lives
Touch of self-consciousness makes stories in collection outstandingly relatable
The hidden horrors of modern life aren’t pretty. Yet, somehow Sarah Meehan Sirk’s debut short story collection “The Dead Husband Project” manages to transcend much of life’s inherent darkness to land in a tender, humane place that’s recognizable to all. An accomplished CBC Radio producer, having worked on national shows such as Q (now q) and Day Six, Sirk honed her writing skills under the mentorship of David Adams Richards while studying at the Humber School for Writers, and it shows. Each of her stories, distinct in its own right, is connected by isolated characters trying to navigate the distraught terrain between where they are, where they’ve come from and where they wanted to be.
The opening titular story has a depth beyond its immediate scenarios that sets the tone and pace for the entire collection. In the halcyon days as newlyweds, a young artist couple agrees upon a macabre future project that has the wife get lost in her husband’s shadow.
That is, until life comes along and changes their plan.
Highlighting life’s nasty habit of changing things abruptly and leaving messes in its wake is Sirk’s bent. Her talent lies in her ability to craft these messes into haunting stories.
“OZK” tells of a young woman trying to piece together her mathematician mother’s intricate system of symbols with hopes of discovering a deeper connection between them. “Barbados” deftly illustrates the arid space between a couple overwhelmed by the rush of love and responsibility of new parenting while haunted by past betrayals.
In “Distance,” a man tries to put space between him and his sadness via alcohol, while “Mommyblogger” delves into the obsessive and destructive nature of past infatuations.
With a keen ear, Sirk nails the nuances of dialogue — between husbands and wives, mothers and daughters, friends and lovers — with the real kickers being the internal ones of characters struggling to give the best impression of themselves from inside their personal reality.
Here Sirk gives voice to a catalogue of traumas and fears stemming from a complex core of familiar emotions.
Sirk’s one word opening line in “What Happens” demonstrates how a single word can trigger a flood of memories and emotions. The poetry of every day isn’t a straight line but fragments and pieces that don’t always make sense.
“The Centre” serves as the axle around which all the other stories revolve.
A retirement home caregiver maps out the life of a patient from photographs around her room that aren’t in sync with reality. Here Sirk’s power as a storyteller shines as she dribbles out details piecemeal leading the reader to the slow realization of what’s really going down. Powerful stuff efficiently packed into a tight, compelling narrative.
The intricate nature of opposites — love and hate, light and dark, life and death — ripple throughout Sirk’s narratives as characters casually point out they are all part of the same continuum: “Funny, almost. You try and try to blank out the memory of the one you hate most in the world and bam! there he is, like a crack of lightning, in the face you love best of all.”
Who knows what side of an emotion you’ll land on? You can’t predict it, you sure can’t control it, but by trying to stay in a strong neutral place — your centre — you have enough to get by on.
Having enough to get by is a recurring motif. The protagonist in “A Drive in the Rain” tries to find something “dry, something clean enough” to keep her moving forward, while “Barbados” has its protagonist consoling herself with trying to be content where she is at that moment: it has “to be enough for now” if she too wants to move through her destructive patterns. Sirk flips the lid off ordinary looking lives to reveal the masses of creepy crawly thoughts just under the surface.
The casual, sarcastic humour of “Jesus, you look like Alice Cooper” of a friend wanting to show concern without getting too committed speaks volumes about the lonely, fearful places her characters reside. It’s this touch of self-consciousness that makes these stories outstandingly relatable.
Taking sideways glances at scenarios, Sirk traipses through dark and hidden spaces that make the absurd seem familiar and the familiar absurd. The artificiality her characters superimpose over their lives — with hopes of passing it off as real — silently destroy them from the inside. The lines between reality and fantasy are blurred almost beyond recognition, but she’s too clever a storyteller to spell things out completely.
Bypassing the formulaic and predictable, “The Dead Husband Project” is a stellar shout out to the power and relevance of the short story. Life rarely pans out as expected, but, as Sirk repeatedly reminds us with her ordinarily remarkable characters, it’s about finding enough in the moment to keep moving forward.