The crisis most of these characters face is losing touch with reality altogether (hence the title). I like seeing people at a moment of crisis or at a moment in time.” You can have a wee malt but if you tried to drink a whole pint of whisky you’d be dead, so there’s something about the intensity. It’s like having a malt whisky really, a short story. In the kitchen of the terraced house where she lives alone in Chorlton, south Manchester, with the central heating on and tea and cake on the table, Kay explains that the reason she feels at home with short stories is that “you can focus on people who are really on the edge, whereas if you did that for the whole length of a novel it might get very tiring. Fourteen out of 15 of these new stories are narrated in the first person, and most give voice to personalities far more precarious and worrisome than Elizabeth Ellen or Cheryl, socially isolated though these two may be. Like a tree in a wild storm.”īut these four stories, with their promises of comfort and joy, are in the minority in Kay’s third collection, Reality, Reality. The narrator of “Bread Bin”, too, has met the love of her life, and experienced her first orgasm at 49: “It went all the way through me it sped back to my birth and hurtled towards my death. “Grace and Rose”, in their eponymous story, are planning the first lesbian wedding on Shetland. Kay is a romantic writer, for whom tenderness is something to celebrate. I need the baby to come and be healthy and I need my dark-dark curly-haired one to suck, but nothing else.” When my baby arrives, we will live from hand to mouth, from her tiny hand to my full mouth. In “The Pink House”, 41-year-old Elizabeth Ellen is broke and homeless, massively in debt, and consoled by her pregnancy: “I feel like I could fly. I’m having none of it.” Until, on 25 December, her overweight and needy friend Sharon arrives at the door with a roast bird, and turns out to be just what Cheryl wants. Cheryl, in “Doorstep”, is hellbent on spending Christmas alone following a breakup: “Hurray! I can opt out of the fattening Christmas meal, the sodden, shrivelled roasted veg, the Christmas pud – do you have brandy butter or custard, do you microwave or steam – and the wrapping paper, the horrid fights about what to watch on television. Usually, the way she tells it, this means finding someone to share it with, and not necessarily a partner. They can be miserable, lonely and pretty desperate. L ife can go either way, for the people in Jackie Kay’s stories.
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