by Lynda Williams
GUERNICA EDITIONS
2025/$22.95/250 pp.
Lynda Williams describes the flavour of her debut short fiction collection, The Beauty and the Hell of It & Other Stories, as “what if Raymond Carver wrote feisty women.” It’s an apt comparison. Williams’s characters, like Carver’s, are bruised by life; their self-knowledge is hard wrought. But the comparison falters when you encounter Williams’s audaciously original humour. In one story, a woman’s disillusionment with life is described through her relationship with a bra. Her expectant delight as she unwraps the new bra from its delicate Victoria’s Secret tissue fades as the underwire digs into her skin and the bra sags after multiple washings. A woman clearing out her mother’s house seatbelts a statue of Jesus into the passenger’s side because she doesn’t “want there to be any confusion about who was saving whom.”
But while dark humour can open psychic distance from trauma, it has a shadow side. In “The Fault is Yours,” the narrator understands that her manic episodes supercharge her charisma: “I was sick in a way that transformed me from flat tap water into sparkling wine,” she says. Invited to speak on a panel of people experiencing mood disorders, she has her audience in stitches. She later regrets this performance, vowing she’ll perform in a circus before offering up her hypomanic episodes for entertainment.
The carefully realized architecture of these stories validates Williams’s tenacious apprenticeship to become a serious writer. She studied at MacEwan and Mount Royal universities and did a mentorship at the Humber School for Writers. In 2024 Williams won the Lieutenant Governor of Alberta Emerging Artist Award. In one story the writer protagonist vows she’ll “give Alice Munro a run for her money” before she turns 30. Disturbed by her relatively uneventful young life, she sets a goal of “collecting strange experiences to weave into fiction.”
Eventually the protagonists of these stories seemed to me interchangeable, their voices similar. One story that stands out is “Miles to Inches,” centred on a brutal rape and the only story narrated in second person. Addressing herself as “you” offers the protagonist space to process her post-traumatic vulnerability. The story’s construction is brilliant: snippets of life as a distracted supermarket cashier are juxtaposed with memories of the rape and subsequent trial, and the narrator’s obsessive perusal of her used copy of the DSM, “wandering through the diagnostic criteria of its disorders as if it were a forest, the same forest where Hansel and Gretel nearly get eaten alive.” It’s been awhile since I’ve read such an original, exciting collection of fiction. Lynda Williams is a writer to watch.
Jannie Edwards is a writer and editor in Edmonton.
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