Whoever Finds This: I Love You: Stories

Faye Moskowitz's first collection of story-essays, A Leak in the Heart (Godine, 1985), was a marvellous exploration of growing up in a Jewish Orthodox family in small-town Michigan, and clearly established her gift for uncovering - and understanding - the constant pulls and liabilities of family relationships. Now, in this new and fiercely caring volume, she turns to other families, to couples young and old, to the conflicts that loyalty, caring, and loss encounter at every step. These are stories of immense compassion and dazzling perception, for she recognized all, and in the end makes us the gift of our very humanity; the sixteen-year-old whose dreams of romance aren't diminished by the stark actuality of sex; the housewife who turns to shoplifting to perk up her all-too-familiar routine; one woman's heartbreaking response to her mastectomy; or how fantasies of a nose job can be a life raft in an indifferent world. We have to laugh through our tears, so well told are these tales. A magical offering that affirms everyone's need for someone to say, "I love you," this collection is sure to find a permanent place in your heart.