My Escapee: Stories (Grace Paley Prize in Short Fiction)

My Escapee: Stories (Grace Paley Prize in Short Fiction) by Vallianatos, Corinna. hardcover edition. ISBN: 9781558499867.

Delicate and assured, the stories in My Escapee illuminate unseen forces in womens lives: the shameful thought, the stifled hope, the subterranean stresses of marriage, friendship, and family. Grappling with lost memories, escaped time, the longing to be loved, and the instinct for autonomy, the stories peer inside their characters minds to their benign delusions, their triumphs and defeats. A girl taking a test for admittance to a selective school finds that what she loves most of all is the ordinary. A lonely young woman, sick of being sick, swaps places with her nurse. A college student deploys her more charming roommate to discover the secret rituals of an all-male club on campus. And in the title story, a woman in a nursing home receives mysterious missives from her longtime lover recalling fragments of their old life together.