| Vendor | |
|---|---|
|
Liepman Literary Agency
Marc Koralnik |
| Original language | |
| English | |
THERE'S ONLY YOU
For Sally, a thirty-eight-year-old mother of two, her family's year-long move to the Mexican city of San Miguel de Allende is an escape from the tedium of suburban American life. Planning to write while her husband, Tom, oversees the construction of a luxury development, Sally instead finds herself pleasantly adrift in her new surroundings. That is, until she meets Louise: an older fellow ex-pat whose intelligence and worldliness captivate Sally, and whose insider knowledge of San Miguel pulls Sally immediately into her orbit.
After a series of starts and stops, in which Sally finds herself both uneasy with Louise's absorbing affection and hungry for the stimulation of her company, she plunges headlong into the relationship. At first playfully, then increasingly in earnest, Sally accepts Louise's pet name for her. She even lets herself be mistaken for Louise's daughter among mutual friends and acquaintances, all while quietly trying to press back memories of her troubled relationship with her own mother. This tangled attachment to Louise is kept largely secret from Tom, as Sally is by turns enchanted with her new life in Mexico and unsettled by Louise's hold over her and her seven-year-old daughter Ida.
As the bond between the two women becomes more and more claustrophobic, the carefully maintained facade of Sally's perfect family life starts to crumble. Unable to escape the ugliness of her own pastor the dark truths of Louise'sSally finds herself hurtling towards a dangerous reckoning in the present.
Gorgeously written and with strong elements of psychological suspense in the vein of THE PERFECT NANNY and TANGERINE, simultaneously spare and luminous with dread like A SEPARATION, and seething with pressurized voice in the tradition of THE WOMAN UPSTAIRS, THERE'S ONLY YOU explores the inner and outer lives of women: their joys and desires, hunger and shame, and the conflicted ambiguity that suffuses being a daughter, a wife, a mother. With its nuanced play of power between characters, THERE'S ONLY YOU is indebted to the work of Patricia Highsmith, while nodding also to the tight psychological observation, ruthless precision, and woozy familial horror of Elena Ferrante.
Leslie Bazzett's short fiction debuted in New England Review and received Special Mention in that year's Pushcart Prize Anthology. Subsequent work has appeared in NER, Carolina Quarterly, West Branch, and Louisville Review, among other places. Her most recent story to appear in NER was listed as Notable in Best American Short Stories. She has been a finalist for a Rona Jaffe Award and the NER Award for Emerging Writers. She lives in Minneapolis with her husband and their two children.
After a series of starts and stops, in which Sally finds herself both uneasy with Louise's absorbing affection and hungry for the stimulation of her company, she plunges headlong into the relationship. At first playfully, then increasingly in earnest, Sally accepts Louise's pet name for her. She even lets herself be mistaken for Louise's daughter among mutual friends and acquaintances, all while quietly trying to press back memories of her troubled relationship with her own mother. This tangled attachment to Louise is kept largely secret from Tom, as Sally is by turns enchanted with her new life in Mexico and unsettled by Louise's hold over her and her seven-year-old daughter Ida.
As the bond between the two women becomes more and more claustrophobic, the carefully maintained facade of Sally's perfect family life starts to crumble. Unable to escape the ugliness of her own pastor the dark truths of Louise'sSally finds herself hurtling towards a dangerous reckoning in the present.
Gorgeously written and with strong elements of psychological suspense in the vein of THE PERFECT NANNY and TANGERINE, simultaneously spare and luminous with dread like A SEPARATION, and seething with pressurized voice in the tradition of THE WOMAN UPSTAIRS, THERE'S ONLY YOU explores the inner and outer lives of women: their joys and desires, hunger and shame, and the conflicted ambiguity that suffuses being a daughter, a wife, a mother. With its nuanced play of power between characters, THERE'S ONLY YOU is indebted to the work of Patricia Highsmith, while nodding also to the tight psychological observation, ruthless precision, and woozy familial horror of Elena Ferrante.
Leslie Bazzett's short fiction debuted in New England Review and received Special Mention in that year's Pushcart Prize Anthology. Subsequent work has appeared in NER, Carolina Quarterly, West Branch, and Louisville Review, among other places. Her most recent story to appear in NER was listed as Notable in Best American Short Stories. She has been a finalist for a Rona Jaffe Award and the NER Award for Emerging Writers. She lives in Minneapolis with her husband and their two children.