4 out of 4 stars
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"For sale: baby shoes, never worn." According to Wikipedia, the legend says that Hemingway bet a table of people ten dollars that he could come up with a full story using only six words. He wrote those six words on a napkin, passed it to everyone there, and accepted his winnings. The first time I heard that story, it was like a knife in my chest. There's a journey one takes when reading it the first time: "So what? People sell baby stuff all the time. Wait, it says they were never worn, why would someone buy baby shoes and then never let their baby wear them? Oh, I get it now. Oh, that's awful!"
It's been a long time since I first heard that story, but taking a moment to let it sink in still has that effect. I'd never come across anything like it again until I read Glimpse by Shannon Halley. In the hour it took me to read Shannon's collection of 24 microstories, it happened at least 10 more times. Glimpse is like digital therapy, catharsis in a mere thirty pages, and a boon to the Kleenex industry all in one.
Glimpse gives readers a brief look into 24 women's lives in 24 very short, stand-alone stories. These women are all simply living their lives, and yet in a few paragraphs, Shannon sets a scene, makes us care for a woman, relate to her, and feel every ounce of her plight. Women deal with loss, pain, breaking up, sickness, regret, the feeling of being trapped, longing for something more, emotional torment, PTSD, dreams that will never come true, love, and so much more. There's something for everyone to relate to on a deep, personal level, and yet it's still so easy to relate to even those stories that we haven't personally experienced as well. "Rosemary" shows us about the pain of not being the favorite child due to something out of our control (looking like her father), "Melanie" shows us how grotesque the male eye can be and the power of a mother's love, "Asha" has the unrelenting strength to find hope in the most painful times while fighting cancer, and "Reagan" shows us that the world moves on no matter how badly we wish it wouldn't. And yet, like the best poetry, while these were some of the lessons and insights I picked up, there's a good chance that you'll read the same words and come up with entirely different meanings.
Some stories are open just enough that a person can interpret them in multiple ways. For example, "Lavinia" speaks of a secret that her mother hides beneath the veneer of a perfect family life, and the only hints readers are given are that it's something bad ("I shouldn't have listened, but I couldn't seem to stop") and that it's nothing new ("I wondered where this secret was going to fit"). These secrets piling up could be almost anything: her mother could be cheating, she could be fighting with her husband, or she could even be getting awful news from a doctor. This allows readers to fill in the gaps with something that's truly relatable to them. "Mae" is similar: Mae is pointing out that her bottle of pills is empty and looking around her room at what items are missing, presumably sold to buy the pills that have run out. She also obviously resents herself. This could be because she's an addict who is coming to grips with her life choices now that she's run out of pills, or she's realizing just how much she's lost due to her sickness and is wondering if life is even worth it any more.
Most amazing to me, though, is just how well Shannon captures the slippery slope into nothingness. Several stories do a phenomenal job of capturing that moment where a person's mind starts descending into a dark place. That one moment where it's so easy to give in to all-encompassing darkness that crushes everything foolish enough to be drawn in, yet our mind aches to continue traveling there once the journey begins. It could happen for many reasons: a memory that's suddenly triggered for any number of reasons, the final straw on a bad day, a terrible bit of news, or my own personal reason, depression. Shannon does it with remarkable talent.
While I was able to pick up every drop of essence from most of the stories, there were times I couldn't quite get everything. I can't be sure if it was something lacking in the story itself or my own shortcoming. After all, Shannon manages to explore countless situations with both remarkable depth and surgical finesse. I don't doubt that someone who has been in each of these positions will relate to them perfectly, but I hope that no one on earth has ever been through everything that these 24 women have endured. I also found a couple of minor errors, although neither of them did much damage to their stories.
When it comes down to it, Glimpse does nearly twenty-four times, with a single page each, what many books fail to do with hundreds of pages: create an empathetic connection to a fictional character. Glimpse easily deserves 4 out of 4 stars for its monumental achievements. I'd recommend it to anyone who enjoys reading over the age of eighteen. I realize that's very general, but I genuinely think that the uniqueness, excellent execution, and widely varying situations mean that there's something for everyone. I wouldn't recommend it to people under that age because they (hopefully!) don't have the life experience to grasp what's going on in most of these stories yet.
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Glimpse
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