How Strange a Season is a collection of short stories published by Megan Mayhew Bergman in 2022. The volume is comprised of stories which were previously published in various periodicals. They are not purposely unified through any singular element such as characters or setting. Certain thematic elements recur throughout many of the stories which do serve to create a loose-fitting bond which identifies the collection as a whole.
All of the stories revolve around empowered women. But this is not a collection that sends the message that all women regardless of circumstances can overcome their oppression and become mistresses of their own destiny. That word mistress is not chosen simply for the sake of gender appropriateness. One character who only appears by reference in a single story within the collection comes to take on great significance. That character is a BDSM mistress—a dominatrix—who has a side hustle selling an online class in the dynamics of power as they relate to non-sexual business relationships. The protagonist of "The Heirloom" has inherited a family ranch which she reinvents as literally a hole in the ground where beta males who presume to be alpha males pay handsomely for the privilege of playing with toys like little boys. Except the toys are life-sized versions of the miniature cars and heavy machinery they played as children. She learns from the dominatrix that very successful men are "still caught up in their mommy and daddy issues...You have to play one or the other." The trick lies in figuring out which issue is working the psyche and exploiting it until success has been achieved.
Two elements are essential to this story besides the business advice. One is that the protagonist is named Regan. The other is that she benefits from inheritance. Literal inheritances are so integral to two stories that one is actually titled "Inheritance." The protagonist of that story is another empowered woman. Her name is Hayes and her story involves literally living in a glass house which is perched on a cliff. "Holland was setting up her Alaskan research station" opens the story titled "A Taste for Lionfish." Then there is Darcy who has inherited her family's orchard in "Peaches, 1979." Farrah is the name of bride who offers her husband four "Wife Days" a week in exchange for three days of total unsupervised and unquestioned independence.
These are not the names of check-out cashiers or waitresses or strippers. Or, rather, they could very well be the names of women with those career prospects, but the notable thing is they are not. These women are also quite notably not named Becky or Edna or Marge. These names subtly indicate that these characters enjoy lives that come with some degree of privilege. Perhaps not necessarily privilege in the form of extravagant wealth, but certainly more privilege than most. It takes a certain level of privilege to transform an archaic ranch into a place where golf-playing hedge fund managers fork over hundreds of dollars to climb into heavy machinery for the sole purpose of destroying cars.
This book is a collection of unrelated stories loosely unified by the thematic assertion that women have come a long way. As one woman tells Hayes, the glass-house heroine, “Your grandmother must have been good in bed...A woman didn’t get million-dollar real estate with good conversation in her time.” That may or may not be true, but it gets straight to the point that times have changed. Grandmothers also didn't have the freedom or nerve to negotiate the number of days they behaved like a perfect wife as opposed to a perfectly normal woman. That era of the grandmother was certainly not one in which business advice could be freely sought—and paid for—from a female instructor whose day job is literally whipping men into submission.
