IN THE DARK CORNERS
Short stories of the macabre
The Dead Husband Project
Sarah Meehan Sirk Anchor Canada
A child who dreams of becoming a ballerina ends up as a stripper in a seedy club.
A care worker in a retirement home stumbles on an appalling truth about an elderly couple in her charge and their seemingly idyllic marriage.
A woman seeking a romantic attachment online gets more than she bargains for when her date turns out to have no face.
Toronto author Sarah Meehan Sirk ventures into some unusual corners in her new book, The Dead Husband Project — and yes, she concedes the very title is a deliberate attention-getter. Toronto Life magazine calls this 247-page volume “the summer’s most macabre short story collection.”
And there’s no denying that the book, published by Anchor Canada, suggests a preoccupation with isolation, loss, ruptured illusions and unfulfilled lives.
All of which prompts a firm clarification from its author.
“That’s not me!” Sirk says, eyes twinkling behind her glasses. “I don’t walk around always thinking about all this, but I’m curious about getting to the edge of a character’s pain to find out what’s there, and I’m also curious about situations where pain should be, but isn’t.”
She’s also driven by a simple curiosity about how we survive in today’s often volatile culture — a curiosity reflected in The Date, Sirk’s creepy slice of social comedy about a man without a face and the perils of internet hookups.
“I never did online dating,” Sirk says. “I was married before the arrival of this thing that everybody seems to do. But I’ve been fascinated by it and by the connections that people can make. And here we have a woman who’s so sad, so anxious to make a connection after breaking up with the man who was supposed to be a life partner …”
So anxious, in fact, that she finds herself sitting across the restaurant table with someone who’s faceless.
Sirk cheerfully agrees this constitutes something of a narrative stretch and starts to explain how she got there and why it’s not as implausible as it sounds. She then stops abruptly, figuring she’s giving too much away.
“Let’s just say that I had a lot of fun with that story, especially because I was up against a brick wall, and didn’t know where it was going.”
She has the discipline to accept that a story will sometimes nudge her in an unexpected direction — even forcing her to alter her initial plan. She cites the book’s title story, The Dead Husband Project, which has a conceptual artist planning to turn the body of her dying husband into an art installation after his passing.
Notwithstanding its bizarre premise, the story also raises provocative questions about the degree to which the envelope of artistic expression can be pushed. But originally Sirk saw it as a fulllength novel.
She soon realized she was taking on too big a load.
She was a CBC producer at the time — “working full time at a very demanding job.”
She was also pregnant — and trying to get “a good chunk” of this projected novel done before her child was born. When she realized she wasn’t coping, she made a pragmatic decision to rework it into a short story.
Sirk has come to realize she’s comfortable with this form.
“There’s something about it that fascinates me — how much ground you can cover in such a small period of time and space,” she says. Furthermore, the short story has a practical benefit that is not provided by the more demanding novel form. “If things aren’t going well, you can throw it out!”
It’s not that surprising that an author delving into our contemporary human comedy should feel free to venture into the territory of the absurd. Yet, even an eerie, otherworldly story such as Moonman has naturalistic underpinnings, and it shares this volume with a story like Barbados, which deals with a crisis in the life of a young wife on a Caribbean holiday with her newborn child and husband while living in daily fear of a medical revelation that could destroy her family.
Barbados is a tale that underlines Sirk’s virtues as an old-fashioned storyteller whose pieces show a clear narrative arc.
“I do think I’m old-fashioned in that way,” she says. “I do think that, as absurd as some of them get, there’s an old-school way in how I approach my stories. I write about what feels real to me. I start from a character or situation.”
Of the 14 stories in the present volume, Barbados is the one of which she’s proudest.
“It’s the one where I felt that a lot was happening to this young wife — things that a lot of people wouldn’t talk about. I think she’s in an extreme situation in some ways, but I think there are subtleties in her character that come out in a way I wasn’t anticipating.”
Some stories deal with marginalized characters — society’s losers, pole dancers, the kind of people who drink wine out of coffee mugs.
“I worked in bars for a long time,” Sirk says by way of explanation. “I was a waitress. I bartended. I was around different classes and upbringings, and a lot of times people would open up and tell me their stories. I’ve always been interested in people — who they are, where they come from and why they have ended up where they are.”