Why I Don't Write

by Susan Minot

A superb collection of short fiction—her first in thirty years and spanning many geographies—from the critically acclaimed author of Monkeys, Evening, and Thirty Girls

A writer dryly catalogs the myriad reasons she cannot write; an artist bicycles through protests in lower Manhattan and ruminates on an elusive lover; an old woman on her deathbed calls out for a man other than her husband; a hapless fifteen-year-old boy finds himself in sexual peril; two young people in the 1990s fall helplessly in love, then bicker just as helplessly, tortured by jealousy and mistrust. In each of these stories Minot explores the difficult geometry of human relations, the lure of love and physical desire, and the lifelong quest for meaning and connection. Her characters are all searching for truth, in feeling and in action, as societal norms are upended and justice and coherence flounder. Urgent and immediate, precisely observed, deeply felt, and gorgeously written, the stories in Why I Don't Write showcase an author at the top of her form.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Writing, Womens, Literary Fiction

176 pages, Hardcover

First published August 4, 2020

About the author

Susan Minot is an award-winning novelist and short story writer whose books include Monkeys, Folly, Lust & Other Stories, and Evening, which was adapted into the feature film of the same name starring Meryl Streep. Minot was born in Boston and raised in Manchester-by-the-Sea, Massachusetts, attended Brown University, and received her MFA in creative writing from Columbia University. She currently lives with her daughter in both New York City and an island off the coast of Maine.

Reviews

[Holly Buderus · Rating 3 out of 5]

The thing about a collection of short stories is that I always end up loving a few of them and hating the rest. This book proves no different. A couple of the stories are excellent, a couple others were pretty good; the rest were complete garbage.

[Davida Chazan · Rating 3 out of 5]

While some of these stories deserve 5/5 stars, others were just... well... strange. Although this is an inconsistent collection, it certainly is interesting. Read more in my review here.

https://tcl-bookreviews.com/2020/07/2...

[Deborah · Rating 3 out of 5]

I’m a fan of Minot’s writing, but this story collection is quite uneven. The good stories are exceptional, but there is one story that’s just a weird, unreadable turkey. Minot is far from prolific, and the title story “Why I Don’t Write,” is a wry riff, made up of discrete one- or two-sentence bursts, on why that is so.

[Michelle · Rating 5 out of 5]

In her latest collection of stories, Susan Minot rages artfully against distraction of political and other varieties. . The stories are as sharp and elliptical as the sentences. If you've been a fan since way back (Lust & Other Stories), this one won't disappoint.

[Joanne · Rating 2 out of 5]

I didn't find much to enjoy in this series of stories. They were mostly just weird. I skipped over several of them, including the title story. One that I really did like was Green Glass, but that was an exception to my overall reaction. Mostly I was left cold.

[Janet · Rating 3 out of 5]

Beautiful writing but I didn’t like the stories. Maybe they just didn’t speak to me? Anyways, wouldn’t really recommend. Everything fell a bit flat for me and although character driven, I never felt connected to the characters. Nothing compared to Alice Munroe Runaways (though maybe unfair to compare)

[Carey Calvert · Rating 5 out of 5]

Why I Don't Write, and other stories, is the first book I've read by Susan Minot, an award winning novelist, short story writer, poet, and screenwriter; most notably the 2007 film, Evening, starring Vanessa Redgrave.

Why I Don't Write is also her first collection of short fiction in 30 years.

I couldn't tell.

Justin Taylor (Riding with the Ghost), whose review for the Times this past September, prompted me to indulge in this cohesive collection; comparing it to her first, Lust, "both books, slender and spare, "Why I Don't Write," is as quiet as "Lust" is loud."

"The stories in Why I Don't Write are concerned with love, death, estrangement, loss, and memory, which means that they are concerned with time itself."

Without a framework based on the author's previous work (although I will now read Lust, and most likely watch Evening sometime this weekend), I simply enjoyed the writing.

The title story, in fragments, describes why this narrator doesn't write ...

"Come to bed."

No one saying, "Come to bed."

Wish I could see him.

It was hard to explain so I gave up.

And it is within this minimalist approach, also used diligently in the story, "Listen," that Minot speaks loudest:

- can't imagine
- can't bear it
- can't look
- can't take another word
- Are you listening?

[Kathie Giorgio · Rating 4 out of 5]

This collection is wonderfully eclectic, providing a variety of storylines and characters. The title story was my particular favorite.

Some of the stories didn't feel finished to me - they dropped off as if the writer simply ran out of interest. This disappointed me; the stories had my attention, but then they didn't go anywhere. Hence the 4 stars instead of 5.

But the stories that did feel complete wowed.

[Jeanne Julian · Rating 3 out of 5]

A well-crafted, eclectic collection that I could admire without much feeling about it, except for the first story, "Polepole," and the grim "Boston Common at Twilight." "Occupied" might try to do too much. "Why I Don't Write," as the title indicates, will resonate with writers who feel stuck. Overall, dark.

[Rebecca · Rating 3 out of 5]

Minot was new to me. These stories were first published between 1991 and 2019, so they span a good chunk of her career. “Polepole” depicts a short-lived affair between two white people in Kenya, one of whom seems to have a dated colonial attitude. In “The Torch,” a woman with dementia mistakes her husband for an old flame. “Occupied” sees Ivy cycling past the NYC Occupy camp on her way to pick up her daughter. The title story, published at LitHub in 2018, is a pithy list of authorial excuses. “Listen” is a nebulous set of lines of unattributed speech that didn’t add up to much for me. “The Language of Cats and Dogs” reminded me of Mary Gaitskill in tone, as a woman remembers her professor’s inappropriate behaviour 40 years later.

Eight of the stories are in the third person and two in the first person. They’re almost all accomplished in terms of scene setting and creating characters and motivations, but I can’t say Minot won me over such that I’ll seek out more of her work. Only a few stories will stay with me: “Green Glass,” in which a man encounters his ex-girlfriend at a wedding and cuts her down to size in a way that alarms his current partner; “Boston Common at Twilight,” an account of a strange but ultimately non-consensual sexual encounter; and my favourite, “Café Mort,” the only one with a speculative edge, about an establishment that only serves the dead.

Originally published on my blog, Bookish Beck.

[Helen Castle · Rating 3 out of 5]

There is a glimmer of brilliance in every story. The dialogue and exchanges between people so perfectly capture the brittle and damaged nature of human relationships and identity. The collection, though, is uneven in its consistency. It is carried by several stories that are skilfully shaped and executed, closing with a poignant message or sting. These, however, are interleaved by a couple that are no more than unworked fragments of dialogue or notes. Rather than being satisfactorily experimental, they leave you with the impression of an author struggling with the writing process.

[Rhonda · Rating 3 out of 5]

Solid collection. A couple of stories really hit home, a couple weren't my favorite. That's the way of short story collections.
Specifically, the few pages of The Torch stirred some intense feelings. I enjoyed Occupied, and The Language of Cats and Dogs will probably resonate with most females on the earth.

[Socraticist · Rating 3 out of 5]

I agree with other reviewers that the weird “stories” don’t work. Maybe as readers most of us are too conventional. I can just picture Susan Minot’s friends, literary agent and publisher all trying to talk her out of the wacko stuff, but well, you know Susan. At least she didn’t waste too much of her life writing them. I don’t mean to be insulting, just expressing an opinion.

I notice that in the conventional stories the omniscient narrator is telling the story from INSIDE the main character and not from a distance. So we are pushed right into the story and we feel its hot breath. That’s a nice trick that I think only really empathic writers can pull off. Impressive.

I read one other of Susan’s books. There I think I described her as “fearless”. This collection has not changed my mind.


The really good stories are:

Polepole
Occupied
The Language of Cats and Dogs (this one is exceptional)

[Michelle · Rating 1 out of 5]

1 star = "did not like it"

And I did not like it. Just not for me. Still found a couple of nuggets.

Quotes

"Sex was like that, not all of you came back right away. Part of you lingered with the person, not unhappily; it was nice to be relieved of yourself, though eventually that part would return." (23)

"It was easy to be unembarrassed when one felt nothing at stake." (45)

[Luann Ritsema · Rating 4 out of 5]

Uneven grouping of stories, some felt almost gimmicky, but a few that really work are very moving.

[Lucy · Rating 2 out of 5]

1.5 ⭐️

I picked this up randomly at the thrift before what would be a very bad date bc the title was compelling but like any thrift (and date) you take a gamble on finding out why it was available in the first place!

the first chunk of these stories weren’t horrible, and had a few good lines, but they just weren’t compelling and didn’t really feel like they had any point beyond a type of ‘girl power’ with a very long expired shelf life. look, I’m not so much a lesbian that I can’t read a story about a woman’s troublesome dynamics with men—a lot of my favorite books and authors circle that point. but they do it with artistic finesse and insight and commentary on the human condition, and it felt like a majority of these stories were at the very precipice of almost reaching that breakthrough but stopped safely short of the edge. it was exceptionally digestible, and that’s not a compliment.

then the titular story was just really stupid, I’m sorry. the whole stream of consciousness thing is fine and all for an undergraduate assignment or an exceptionally skilled writing voice but a mediocre swing isn’t gonna cut it. and there were a couple similar stories of its ilk that ticked me off.

then, there was the part that I checked out, when it got randomly transphobic? and not that there’s any reason to, but whatever commentary the author was trying to make just felt random and unconnected and the only place that trail could lead was wanting to employ an easily vilified type of person to garner sympathy for a character that, should she have done her job as a writer, would have garnered sympathy regardless. in fact, I didn’t hate the short story in question (didn’t like it, but I digress) until it took that turn, and then it felt cheap and like it was directly counteracting the point it was trying to make.

[Betsy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Of course she does write and I'm thankful for this collection of smart, interesting, diverse short stories, many sharing the interior thinking of a woman about my age (60s) and situation (white, middle class) moving through the world, in this case NYC, Boston and the North Shore during the 1980s to present day, with delicate nods to Occupy Wall Street and the Trump regime. I don't always read about people like me but when I do, it's interesting to find out how their thinking and writing differs from mine. (Minot is a poet/fiction writer. I am not, yet.) One story that grabbed me was about a middle-aged woman looking back on a formative year in college when her mother died suddenly and she was trying to understand men, from a college boy to a lecherous professor. The story is as much about the shifting perspective when looking back in hindsight, scrutinizing a memory of a different time with a contemporary lens, something I've been thinking and writing about a lot.
Another 1980s' story about a 15-year-old prep school boy's diasterous attempt to buy pot in Boston Common and his crumbling Waspy family had an "Ice Storm"/"Holden Caufield" feel to it. "Cafe Mort" is a clever story about a bar whose customers are all, yes, mort (dead).

[T. Coughlin · Rating 3 out of 5]

The last story in the collection stood out from the rest, which felt pieced together from images of a remembrance, yet felt fully realized. The narrator has a good voice, sincere and believable as I wouldn't doubt that this is a true story, perhaps with the added tag line, Let's speak the language any cat or dog..., and, mom getting hit by a train.

The author has some great images in the story. The car as a fish tank, the long armed student. I wasn't sure about the mom getting hit by a train. When I was done with the story, it's not what I remembered about it, or cared about. I know she used the death as a way to put her character in a state of emotional shock so that she would feel almost there in the prof's car, but not fully there. It did work for what she wanted, but the death of a mom via train, wow.

The most powerful line is that "language of cat or dog" line. She analyzes it several times, opens the story with it and brings it in at the end. Those last 3 paragraphs hit home, especially that last line about a man being able to snap a woman's arm in half. Great stuff.

[Susan Koch · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read all the stories in one afternoon. I have read all Susan Minot’s other works and this was not a favorite. I didn’t enjoy Why I don’t write and the other similar one with disjointed sentences. I got their point but found them too long to hold my interest.

My favorite was Polepole, set in Africa. It’s probably because I could identify with the woman as she reflected on the situation she found herself in. The author and I are approx the same age and life with men, when we were in our 20’s and 30’s was a bit confusing. I hadn’t yet found my own voice and therefore found myself in situations that just seem to have happened. I bet the same could be said for the author,

The story about the young boy in Boston was disturbing but well done. The one about the couple bickering was sad/funny but good.

All and all my 3 star rating means I found the entire collection uneven but I’m glad to have read it. After finishing, I remembered my younger days and how much I’ve grown since then.

[Jenna · Rating 2 out of 5]

Thanks to @vintageanchorbooks for sending me Why I Don’t Write by Susan Minot. This is the second collection I’ve finished this month for #storyseptember. I had high hopes for this one, but ultimately it did not work for me. Most of the stories felt underdeveloped. One story struck me as very transphobic and I was very surprised it was included in the collection. It left me with a bad taste in my mouth. There was one random story that had supernatural elements (Cafe Mort) that felt completely out of place. One story (Listen) consists entirely of unattributed dialog about politics lately but somehow manages to say nothing at all. The only story I really liked much at all was the last one - The Language of Cats and Dogs, about a college student who is victim of unwanted advances of her male professor.

Almost nothing about this collection really moved me, or made me feel much of anything except indifference. I know there is a lot of love for Minot’s previous books. I’m just very uninspired to pick them up after this one.

[Erin · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really need to stop reading short story collections.

Danielle Evans' "The Office of Historical Corrections" was so perfect it convinced me that maybe I could like short stories after all, and then I read this and realized lol no. This was so uneven and the writing felt stiff and formal and held me at a distance in almost every single one. All of the characters have dumbass names, too. Ned, Bonnie, Daisy, Dexter, Frannie, Buster, George, Crystal. It's as if Minot was trying too hard, in almost every respect. I skipped "Listen" after the first five lines of stilted dialogue. The titular story is an unpunctuated stream of conscious/listicle. The only redeeming light in this whole (blessedly slim) collection is "The Torch," which was only 3 and a half pages and was by far the best story out of them all. Minot (or her editor) was smart to put it up front, because I kept reading the rest of the stories hoping any of them would live up to that one. Unfortunately, none of them did.

[Cherise Wolas · Rating 3 out of 5]

An elusive core to these stories and themes, but perhaps relationships (old, not working, new romance changing, over) love, and loss, and in some the effects of memory, a looking back at how things were, how they're seen now. One story is strictly dialogue, I gather about the election but it was hard to tell if it was a send-up of liberal views or not; another was short paragraphs about what is being heard, or thought, or read, or interrupting, as a writer does or does not write. The rest were structured conventionally: a boy hoping to buy pot ends up in a frightening and consummated situation that has lasting effects; a woman, forty years later, looks back at the sexual advances of her writing professor. There's a lightness to the writing, and a melancholy, and the stories reach varying levels of success.

[Dot · Rating 1 out of 5]

So disappointing. A mishmash of stories dredged up from the archives of the early 1990s (noticeable even if you don't check the copyright page) and ideas that clearly got a lot of applause during the workshop but really should have stayed there. The final story, "The Language of Cats and Dogs," is interesting in that it takes a classic Minot trope (younger woman in an unequal emotional situation with a man) and recasts it for the #metoo era, but it would have been stronger if Minot had been able to step back from her own traumatic experience about the tragic early death of her mother, because the obvious biographical elements are holding the story back. The good news is this will prompt me to reread Monkeys and Lust, which still hold coveted places on my shelves.

[Mayumi Shimose Poe · Rating 3 out of 5]

Finished Susan Minot’s “Why I Don’t Write,” which was somewhat uneven in quality. Many of the stories fell flat, but reading is so personal and subjective that the same story may soar for you. 🤷🏻‍♀️ That’s the beauty of art and an argument for myriad, diverse voices... 🤷🏻‍♀️ The strongest stories centered on liminal feeling—a feeling that is between feelings, a complicated feeling, that is both/and—during moments of trespass. How many ways do we—especially women—freeze up and endure our way through things that we try to tell ourselves are little nothings but which end up rerouting our lives? Enjoyed-ish this book, moments got me thinking, and the title story cumulatively *nails* the answer to asking a writer “what did you do all day?”

[Susan Oleksiw · Rating 3 out of 5]

Susan Minot is a successful novelist and short fiction writer. This is her second collection of short fiction, and it is at best uneven. Of ten stories, three are fully realized and will prod the reader to think more deeply; three are less successful but resonate nonetheless; two don't quite get off the ground, and two seemed fillers more than stories.

Most of the stories will take readers familiar with the author's work into well-known territory in terms of class and social issues as well as geography. Several of the characters seem adrift, not sure where they're going, how they got where they are, and whether or not it matters.

Beautifully written, the stories nonetheless can fail to satisfy because the characters don't inhabit more than the language.

[Melissanomelle · Rating 3 out of 5]

Why I don't write is a quiet and reflective book. A collection of short stories seeking truth beyond tradition, the lure of love, unknowability and human connection. The book starts off with bang, a short story set in Nairobi, Kenya. Exploring the complex human relations and what happens when we take things slow and say what we mean, polepole. Two of the short storycollectiin stood out. Polepole and Cafemort. A cafe that a serves dead people. What an interesting concept!!! My jaw was on the floor. Customers came in exactly how they died and ordered coffee and deserts while giving advice that was either intrusive or ironic depending on your perspective. The narrator made this story come to life feeling like you are in cafe serving dead people. This was tender and strangely comforting.

[James B · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’ve been a fan since Monkeys, her first book of short stories. It was so nice to spend time with this slender volume of ten stories that deal with standing outside the park in NYC during the Occupy protest, remember a professor who makes a sexual pass even forty years after the event, going to a wedding and being jealous of ex lovers for very different reasons and a very playful story where a waitress waits on a room of diners who all happen to be dead. A fun book with an author who always has such unique insights to her characters and the world’s they inhabit.

[Jessie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some of the stories in this collection--"Polepole," "The Language of Cat and Dogs"--were outstanding. "Boston Common at Twilight" in particular was incredibly powerful and deeply affecting; I will be thinking about it for a long time. But the rest were forgettable. A couple ("Why I don't Write", "Listen") even felt-straight up unfinished. I get that maybe Minot was playing with form, but these pieces ended up feeling more like notes about stories than actual stories. That said, the good ones were SO good that I'm looking forward to reading more of Minot's work.

[False · Rating 2 out of 5]

I started reading Susan Minot at the start of her published career, and I always looked forward to her next book. Then...nothing. When I saw this book, I latched on to it, even put it aside for when it could receive my proper attention and concentration. In the end? I really was looking forward to reading this but, it just seemed to be a trail of random thoughts and no real emotion, sorry but I have to say it was the title that intrigued me and the stories had great subject ideas maybe but the execution was almost lobotomized. It isn't her best work.

[Taylor M. · Rating 3 out of 5]

Overall I just don't understand this book. There are only two stories that I liked (Cafe Mort and The Language of Cats and Dogs). There others felt disjointed and more of a flow-of-consciousness style of writing). I will give credit to the beautiful and thoughtful vocabulary of each story, but ultimately I couldn't get into the plots. The characters were interesting, in that they were diverse and often show of side of thoughts not typically shown in writing (big thanks to a woman writer not making her women characters cliches). I think I might enjoy reading one of Minot's longer books.