From Frankie Barnet (‘a devastating parodist.’ Katy Waldman, The New Yorker) comes a wildly inventive collection of stories that explore the contradictions and precarity of life—told with bold style, biting wit, and offering astonishing moments of clarity and recognition.
Mommies All the Way Down delivers fourteen surreal stories that upend what we think we know about womanhood, motherhood, and the near-constant dread animating modern life. A woman inventories the chicken dishes she’s cooked for potential partners as a way of understanding her life. A young mother re-assesses her work history at a brothel that operates like a fight club. An aspiring painter shamefully conceals the full-size horse she neglects in her small apartment. A couple rescue a stray kitten and raise him as their son, eventually sending him off to university. An inexperienced writer poses as an incel in an online men’s chat room with unpredictable consequences. A tight-knit group of friends stage an intervention and send their ‘worst friend’ to rehab for her personality.
Told with Frankie Barnet’s signature clear-eyed emotional precision and dry humour, these prismatic stories reveal a writer who nails the texture of living: the ongoing negotiations of power, unfulfilled ambition and desire, the relentless pressure of biology, and the search for safety. Reading these stories is a subversive gut-punch and proof that giving in to the absurd offers a satisfying thrill of recognition and relief.
Genre: General Fiction
Mommies All the Way Down delivers fourteen surreal stories that upend what we think we know about womanhood, motherhood, and the near-constant dread animating modern life. A woman inventories the chicken dishes she’s cooked for potential partners as a way of understanding her life. A young mother re-assesses her work history at a brothel that operates like a fight club. An aspiring painter shamefully conceals the full-size horse she neglects in her small apartment. A couple rescue a stray kitten and raise him as their son, eventually sending him off to university. An inexperienced writer poses as an incel in an online men’s chat room with unpredictable consequences. A tight-knit group of friends stage an intervention and send their ‘worst friend’ to rehab for her personality.
Told with Frankie Barnet’s signature clear-eyed emotional precision and dry humour, these prismatic stories reveal a writer who nails the texture of living: the ongoing negotiations of power, unfulfilled ambition and desire, the relentless pressure of biology, and the search for safety. Reading these stories is a subversive gut-punch and proof that giving in to the absurd offers a satisfying thrill of recognition and relief.
Genre: General Fiction