Vertigo

Vertigo is a book of linked, poetic short stories by British author Joanna Walsh. It follows one family's domestic life during the first years of having a small child. A self-contained reflection on one woman's experience as a mother, daughter, lover, and wife, it also serves as a larger criticism of the challenges of young motherhood, the infantilizing effect of pregnancy and having children, and much more. The book also discusses infidelity and the fear of infidelity, financial struggle, and medical emergencies, culminating in fourteen stories that serve as episodes in a single life, like scenes from a movie.

The stories don't have a particularly strong chronology, but they do build on each other as they move through, depicting different facets of one woman's experience of her family. In the first story, the unnamed female main character eats lunch by herself at an oyster restaurant overlooking the French sea. She spends her meal gazing out over the expanse of water separating her body from her husband’s; he is traveling, and far from home. She reflects that where he is, it isn't even lunch time yet, and she wonders if he has made it yet to the small town where he has to go for work, and if in that small town he has met the woman he will have an affair with tonight. She knows that if her husband does have sex with this stranger, he will do it tonight, much later in the evening, and that he probably hasn't even made it yet to the city where he will sleep tonight. She wonders about the likelihood of this incident – whether her husband will have an affair, whether he already is having an affair, with a kind of detached logic. She says, matter of factly, “There is nothing I can do to prevent this.”

In other stories, the woman tells more about her small family. She writes in “Vertigo” about their family vacation, which they spent among some European ruins and which was dictated by the principle of spending as little money as possible. In the story “Young Mothers,” she reflects on the infantilizing quality of being pregnant and having a young baby. In her view, the mother and baby almost become one, with mothers wearing larger versions of toddler's dresses to cover their big bellies. Similarly, she writes on the bizarre, child-like qualities of the nurse she meets in the story “In the Children's Ward,” as she waits for news about her child's medical condition. The nurse has an apron covered in pictures of kissing cats, which feels like a mockery given the situation. Her son, whom she calls “the boy,” is distant from her, both part of her body and distinctly alien. She spends most of her time waiting for him to come out of surgery thinking about her husband's abandonment of the family on the first floor of the hospital, and her own experience in her body, rather than the health of her son.



“Online,” returns to the narrative of infidelity when the narrator finds records of her husband's online relationships with various women. The multiplicity of his deceit causes her to reflect on the properties of “his women,” thinking about their many legs, butts, breasts, lips, flops of long hair. She sees these women as a monstrous clump of body parts, and herself among them, participating in that mass of unidentified female embodiment. She talks about asking her husband, theatrically, what he likes for breakfast, mocking the banality of the questions asked by these foreign women. Of course, living with him, she already knows the answer, and she ponders the ways that these distant women benefit from that lack of familiarity.

Overall, the collection comes together as a dark, lonely portrait of the life of a commonplace, if dysfunctional, young family. The morose and often self-centered quality of the narrator's thoughts can be uncomfortable for readers but reflects a larger understanding of the complexity of motherhood, love, and family life.

Joanna Walsh is a British author of a number of story collections, fairy tales, and other works of hybrid fiction that experiment with style and form. She is an editor at Catapult and works as a journalist and doctoral student at the University of East Anglia. She runs the twitter account @read_women, and won a 2017 Arts Foundation Fellowship for Literature, among other awards. She used to work as an illustrator, and her art has been published a number of prominent newspapers.