One couple, many endings
Short stories that use magic realism to alter the circumstances of one couple’s life together, many times, to see what happens.
July 23rd, 2024
Myriam Lacroix created Out-Front, an LGBTQ+ writing group whose goal was to expand the possibilities of queer writing. She currently lives in Vancouver. Photo Charles Anthony.
Author Myriam Lacroix’s genre-bending debut novel delves into the promises and perils of love, offering a unique, raw and humorous portrayal of queerness and human connection.
by Carellin Brooks
Lives transformed by chance are a staple plot in movies and novels. The appeal is clear. How much of who we are and what we do is determined by simple happenstance? I know a man who has a successful career in shipping logistics. In his early adult years, he met a girlfriend’s father who was in the business. The father taught him the basics and the rest, as they say, is history. Many of us have similar stories. We met someone and learned something that led us to become the person we are today. But what if we hadn’t ever gone to that fateful meeting, met that particular person, made that choice? Who would we be then?
Myriam Lacroix’s new collection of short stories, How it Works Out, takes this premise—how different we could be depending on our different circumstances—and runs with it. The two main characters of each version are lesbian couple Myriam, spelt like the author, and Allison, who live through various alternate lives in each story. We are in for a rollicking ride from the first whiz-bang of a sentence: “They’d planned on getting beer from Toby’s, but instead they got a baby, and they were not unhappy about it.”
Myriam and Allison’s misadventures range from silly to serious, starting with the first story, where they find not only the baby but the baby’s mom, eventually becoming a parenting trio. The looseness of the writing has something of a film caper feel to it, mixing violence, low comedy and improbable redemption in roughly equal doses.
Subsequent stories veer farther into the unusual. In Love Bun, the lovers become cannibals, circumstantial at first, after they go skating and Allison accidentally severs a finger. The narrative voice here, in first person, doubles down on Myriam’s questionable choices. “When she talked like that I was reminded that she was a few years older than me, and it made me want to have sex with her,” says Myriam. Her desire may or may not be related to Myriam’s secretly harbouring Allison’s missing digit: “Allison’s finger slipped into my palm the way it had countless times before, when it had been attached to her,” adds Myriam and then she consumes it on the sly behind a Dumpster in the alley.
Magic realism never really went anywhere, but right now it is having a particular moment. Indigenous and lesbian authors, among other historically marginalized groups, have found that fantastical fiction offers tools for depicting racism, colonialism and homophobia in playful ways.
In one story, Allison is a faithful dog, Myriam a praying mantis, and their owner is their captor. In another, Myriam is lazy and deceitful—she knows Allison’s too good for her, but despite internal vows to become a better partner, she’s happy to slip back into dependence and let her girlfriend do it all. But wait: a few pages on, a different story, and Allison becomes the manipulator, a hypochondriac who withholds love unless her girlfriend joins her in wholeheartedly endorsing each supposed emergency. In the titular short story, the couple are evenly matched: jealously monitoring exes and evaluating friends, arguing on the sly. The children they bred in Love Bun for eventual consumption appear here as ghosts: “Moms! Moms!” “Her hand passed through me, but I felt the tug in my bones.”
Part of the fun of this collection is the sheer pleasure of seeing what the author invents next. In one story, middle-aged influencers getting married to interest publishers in a sequel to their book about healthy lesbian relationships in patriarchal times, also titled How it Works Out. That’s just one of the many “Easter egg” equivalents Lacroix gives to her characters. In another story, Myriam meets a doppelganger who looks, walks, and talks just like departed Allison, except for being slightly blue-white in colour. Then the original Allison reappears. What’s a girl to do?
In the kinkiest of these stories, Myriam is the CEO of a company, and Allison the narrator and the CEO’s low-level peon who finds herself getting involved with a very rich woman very fast.
The fantastical elements in these stories are grounded in the sorts of details any couple and any Vancouverite can recognize: “Allison and I like small dinner parties, but otherwise we just stay home and watch movies in bed, or play Boggle, or talk.” Or, take the instance where Allison leaves Myriam in Love in the Dark after a run to Norman’s Fruit and Salad store.
In the last story, an actor plays out the fateful scene where Allison loses a finger on the skating rink. “She should have been herself,” she thinks as the story ends, “whoever that was supposed to be.” Identity, in these stories, is constructed not so much by our will as by circumstance. It’s a sobering realization that all that we hold closest, how we define ourselves, is as provisional and fragile as that consequential decision to accept the role of the girlfriend in the movie, ignore an abusive Allison’s sudden rages, or take our very first bite of human flesh. 9780385698405
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Carellin Brooks is the author of Learned and four other books. She lives in Vancouver.
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