Essay Questions

Who are Anna and Harry and what are they doing in this collection?

This collection contains twenty-one stories by the author, most of which are not connected to any other except through themes and certain recurring motifs. Although often categorized under the label Lesbian Fiction (or, more so today, LGBTQ), the stories are not exclusively about same-sex relationships. In fact, many more than might be expected from this author deal with relationships between men and women. Even among those stories, however, a subset of tales—kind of a collection-within-the-collection do have connective tissue linking them together. That connection is the marriage of a couple named Harry and Anna. While these stories are linked in a way that creates a narrative arc about the couple stretching over the length of the stories, they are also linked as outsiders or outliers within the overall tone of the collection. The author has somewhat dismissively referred to them as her “Anna and Harry” stories which were composed with a very distinct target audience: readers of Canada’s more mainstream women’s magazines. Thus, Anna and Harry inhabit a less complex universe than the characters in the other stories and go about their business with a lighter touch guiding them.

How do you solve a problem like Maria?

Maria is the protagonist of “More Than Money” which may be one of the shortest stories in the collection but is about a problem impacting a huge swatch of the public. Maria and Freddy are the happily married parents of Tad and Freddy. The marriage is happy, but that does not mean their life is good. In fact, life is getting pretty tough. The story opens with Freddy inquiring about whether the recent talk of the family moving to a new home is the real deal or not. It is the real deal and not because a great deal landed in their lap. In fact, the move will take them from mortgage on a house to a rent payment for an apartment. The problem upsetting this portrait of domestic tranquility is one common enough: addiction. It is the specific monkey on Maria’s back that makes it unusual. For Maria is addicted to spending money that the family does not have. It is a story a shopaholic and though relatively light in tone, it is no funnier than a tale of crack addiction on the other side of the tracks. How do you solve a problem like Maria? Well, there’s the rub, isn’t it?

What makes “One Can of Soup at a Time” a very unusual short story?

“One Can of Soup at a Time” is only a few pages long, but its brevity isn’t unusual in a collection feature a number of stories that run roughly the same number of pages. The story is about a brittle state of the relationship between a heterosexual romantic couple and that certainly does not make it stick out. Undertones of female empowerment, misogyny, patriarchy, and gender expectations also influence the story at hand, but those topics are touched upon in many of the other stories. What makes the story unique not just for this collection, but as a work of short fiction targeted to a mainstream readership begins with the fact that it is related about 90% through dialogue. In fact, it reads more like an experimental short play than a short story. Even more unusual is that not only is none of that ten percent non-dialogue prose geared toward describing the man and woman having the conversation, but the reader never even learns their names.