In this new collection of short stories, A Guide To Being Born, Ramona Ausubel tells eye-opening tales of life with strangely fictitious compelling twists. The eleven stories are divided into four periods: Birth, Gestation, Conception, and Love.
These stories face some of the most difficult aspects of life that most people choose to shy away from, from teenage pregnancy, to death, to growing old, and the concept of what happens next. Ausubel’s short stories capture your attention and leave you questioning: how you move on after each life changing experience? How do you continue to live after everything you are forced to bear that is unbearable? Each story has a unique flair that brings light to each of the real life topics in a whirlwind of tales spun with fascinating imagery. Each story brings in a variety of terrible truths that the reader can’t help but want to read on to find out what happens next.
In “Safe Passage,” from the Birth, section the reader follows the story of a grandmother named Alice who finds herself on a freighter with other grandmothers heading towards an unknown island. In this story, the reader is forced to face the concept of life after death and what happens not only to yourself, but also to the people you leave behind. Ausubel writes “The day she will not attend is laid out before her, the newspaper she will not read lands at her doorstep. The phone, the refrigerator, the cat. She holds her own hands” (18). Here Ausubel compels the reader to really question the notion of the people and life left behind when someone dies. Instead of looking at it from the point of view of family and friends who were left behind when someone they love dies, she takes us on a ride with the grandmother who has passed on effectively making the reader question what they will think back on as they move on. Reading this story, I found myself mournful at the idea that the world will continue to move on once I myself am gone and the pain of leaving behind the ones I love who will have to learn to live without me.
In “Atria,” from the Gestation section, the reader is tugged along on a young teen’s journey as she thinks of what her mother means when she says to grow up. Hazel finds herself pregnant after having sex with a random boy behind a 7-11 and then being raped behind a church of all places and refuses to see her baby as anything but a real life animal. Because Hazel has had something terrible happen to her, she sees the baby as nothing but a monster, an animal born of terrible circumstances and irreversible mistakes. Ausubel writes, “ ‘If it has four legs, I guess we can just get another pair,’ she said quietly. ‘It’s not twins – would have seen it in the pictures.’ ‘I never said it was twins’ ” (66). Here we can see how she portrays Hazel as fully believing her baby will be anything but human. This is a terrible twist that truly shows the horror of rape and mistakes made and what it can do to a person, opening the reader’s eyes to one of the many horrors of life. The reader and feels helpless as each scene plays out, knowing that there is nothing they can do to help her.
In “Catch and Release,” in the Conception section, we get the story of Buck and how she meets a war general ghost from the past who helps her to learn a little more about herself. Ausubel uses this short story to really look at the history of a name, telling us that it does and doesn’t define who we are. Our story is ours alone to write and make of it what we will, writing, “ ‘The story of Buck is just getting going’ he whispered” (121). This line really stood out to me because this is something more people need to point out. That we are the authors of our own story and no matter what has happened to us that there is always a future a new beginning just waiting for us to grab hold of it.
Finally in “Tributaries,” from the Love section, the reader is pulled into a world where if you truly love someone you will grow another arm, a love-arm. This is common in the society Ausubel creates and is used by her to allow readers to question just what she is trying to symbolize. One of my favorite lines from this story is, “ ‘My love is bigger than any limb,’ he tells her. ‘What is mine then?’ ” (190). This opens the reader’s eyes to the idea of what would happen if true love was proved by a love-arm growing. This sentence refers to a man whose love-arm is not real, but his wife’s is. This shows just how one person may love someone who thinks they love them back, but may never really know. While I did enjoy this short story it was also a little confusing. Ausubel creates this concept but never really makes sense of how it works. For example, one of the teachers has many loves so she has grown hands all over her body, but never grows a full love-arm. This poses questions of why no one else has grown hands that show their love of their family as well as a love-arm for their “soul mate” so to speak. This story makes the reader truly question just what Ausubel is trying to get at with this over all story of love-arms. By doing this she allows the reader to find a multitude of meanings behind each short story she wrote.
Ausubel continues to create moving and reality shattering themes throughout the rest of her short stories. In a truly new and compelling way she pulls the reader into a world of reality and fantasy that will have you wondering just what happens next. Where will she go from here and how will each story end. If you truly enjoy a bit of reality mixed with fantasy on some of the darker topics of life, I would recommend sitting down and reading this book for the day. You might just find you have a new outlook on life when you finish the final page.
About the Author: Ramona Ausubel grew up in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She is the author of a new novel, Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty, forthcoming in June, 2016 from Riverhead Books as well as the novel No One is Here Except All of Us (2012), and a collection of short stories A Guide to Being Born (2013). Winner of the PEN Center USA Literary Award for Fiction and the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award, she has also been a finalist for the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award, and long-listed for the Frank O’Connor International Story Award and the International Impac Dublin Literary Award. She holds an MFA from the University of California, Irvine where she won the Glenn Schaeffer Award in Fiction and served as editor of Faultline Journal of Art & Literature.
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