![]() ![]() She knew they couldn’t help themselves-most of them were young and in the habit of posting every thought and whim online. Kim had learned to take in the superstitions and idiosyncratic details couples shared with her without letting her surprise or boredom show. He liked other people’s children just fine, he’d told Kim during their second meeting, his fiancée’s expression blank as he talked, but he didn’t want any of his own-lucky for him because his sperm count wasn’t the greatest, possibly because he was born during a period of intense solar flares, and his mother had eaten a lot of seaweed while pregnant with him. She wondered why they were in such a hurry to marry-they’d met only seven months earlier, when the ink on Ryan’s second set of divorce papers wasn’t yet dry and Emily Ann had just joined Gamblers Anonymous and was trying to adopt a child from Guatemala, a quest Ryan had convinced her to set aside in favor of adopting two puggles. Kim had a feeling the groom was stoned every time she met with him and the bride, but he wasn’t inarticulate or dopey, only vague and smiling. These new clients, Ryan and Emily Ann, had money and divorced parents, several half- and step-siblings, and, for the moment, good attitudes. After watching four of these clips for reasons Kim still didn’t understand, she’d had trouble looking him and the bride in the eye. She hadn’t searched for him online, having managed to break this habit after looking up a different client several months earlier and discovering he was semi-famous for a series of YouTube videos he’d posted of himself performing homegrown stunts in the Jackass vein, which included swallowing half a bottle of motor oil mixed with Bailey’s Irish Cream and dangling heavy objects from his penis while, off-camera, others howled with drunken laughter. They were both in their thirties, but Kim wasn’t sure if the groom was fibbing about his age-half of his face was hidden behind a dark beard, and he kept his hair, thick and shiny, tied in a youthful ponytail. It was the bride’s second marriage, the groom’s third. Yet undeniably, Sneed proves these mortals are gathered under the same rented tent, bound together by their imperfections, and it’s in that zone that the dichotomies of the story live. Everyone is hungry, everyone is wounded, and, as custom demands, everyone must be merry nonetheless. We linger with the scars of the wife-to-be, the secret yearnings of the groom, the screw-ups of the uncle, the fury of the groom’s brother, and the gnawing voids in the lives of those attending, including a kleptomaniac sister. (Could we go out on a limb and imagine that the story comes to us through the efforts of this psychic, who is so good at understanding others yet not herself?) I love the absorbing asides that unfurl like tentacles beyond the story’s margins, letting in sudden, often shocking, dimensions. We traffic in the psyches of the key players in “the bride’s second marriage, the groom’s third,” including the wedding planner and a hired psychic. This story, “Wedding Party,” captures the essence of what Sneed brings us in her collections-it’s a story panoramic in scope, witty and wise. There is no other way to put it-she is a master of the form. Her emotionally rich, virtuosic prose predicates story upon story, and I’m awed by the range of her subjects, her gift for distilling thorny situations into elegant, lucid narratives, and the perceptive humanity of her vision. “Within a few pages,” she writes, “the best short story writers show us in a fresh, perceptive way the disquieting and beautiful complexity of our shared experiences.”ĭirect Sunlight, Sneed’s third collection, fully delivers on her promise of what short fiction can do. ![]() In her Chicago Tribune essay, “Short Stories Deserve Love, Too,” she enthusiastically champions short fiction and roots for its practitioners to succeed in the novel-oriented world of publishing. We Are Gathered Here Today to Eat, Drink, and Be RuthlessĬhristine Sneed is one of our most committed short story writers.
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