If I Loved You, I Would Tell You ThisStories

Expert, unblinking prose about the sturm und drang of family life
Familial sturm und drang stirs up the ten stories in Robin Black’s sobering debut collection — whether it’s a father watching his daughter prepare for college; a dying mother thinking of her mentally impaired son; a daughter mourning her suicidal father; a grieving widow; a young wife pondering an affair. With expert unblinking prose, Black teaches her characters tough love by leaving them to knock on emotional walls.

Cracks in the parental shield are on view in the title story, as a terminally ill woman considers explaining her fate to her adult son, who is permanently hospitalized for a brain defect. She addresses the reader in unsparing first person, as if composing a letter. “Maybe the problem is he’s never been hurt. He can’t imagine real pain because he’s never experienced it,” her husband says, trying to be reasonable. Elsewhere, a painter grieves for her husband and senses death relinquishing her control like “the sensation of being back on the passenger side of some vehicle” (“Immortalizing John Parker”). Others have trouble loosening their grip. In “The Guide,” Jack Snyder drives his teenage daughter, Lila, who was blinded in a childhood accident, to pick up her first guide dog. Reluctant to let go, Jack’s mind sorts through a trunk load of baggage — a mistress and impending divorce — that he’s hiding from his daughter. Snyder thinks back on a letter of forgiveness, received after Lila’s accident, and a passage that serves as advice for the adrift souls in this book: “Pain that is shared, can be pain that is lessened.” If only they’d follow it. Several voices embody these tales, including Mark Deakins, Ann Marie Lee, Kimberly Farr and Kirsten Potter. Deakins’ reading of “The Guide,” like the author, treats grief as a helpless fact of life.