She Was Like That: New and Selected Stories

A New York Times Notable Book of 2019 selection, a New York Times Editors’ Choice book, and longlisted for the Story Prize—from the bestselling, highly acclaimed National Book Award nominee, She Was Like That is a “piercing, intimate, and exquisite” (Publishers Weekly) collection of new and selected stories that capture “the joys and anxieties of motherhood” (Star Tribune, Minneapolis).

In these twelve deft, acutely funny, and often heartbreaking stories, “Walbert captures with an unusual combination of restraint and rhapsody” (The New York Times) the questions women ask themselves and the definitions assigned to them as wives, mothers, and daughters. Her characters are searchers, uneasy in one way or another. They yearn for connection.

In the riveting opening story “M&M World,” a woman is plunged into panic when she briefly loses one of her daughters at the vast and over-stimulating Times Square store. In “Slow the Heart,” a single mother tries to ease tension at the dinner table with Roses and Thorns, the game she knows the Obamas played in the White House. In “Radical Feminists,” a woman skating with her two children encounters the man who derailed her career years earlier. And in the poignant, “A Mother Is Someone Who Tells Jokes,” a mother reflects on the nursery school project that preceded her son’s autism diagnosis. This is a deeply moving, resonant collection from a writer “rightly celebrated for her ability to capture the variety and vulnerability of women’s lives with a combination of lyricism and brawn” (NPR).

Kate Walbert is the author of seven works of fiction: She Was Like That, longlisted for the Story Prize and a New York Times Notable Book of the Year; His Favorites, an Atlantic Monthly Best Book of the Year; The Sunken Cathedral; A Short History of Women, a New York Times Book Review 10 Best Books of the Year and finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; Our Kind, a National Book Award finalist; The Gardens of Kyoto; and the story collection Where She Went. Her work has appeared in many publications, including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Best American Short Stories, and The O. Henry Prize stories. She lives with her family in New York City.

 

ISBN: 9781476799445
Format: Paperback
Pages: 256
Publisher: Scribner
Published: June 01, 2021

Praise for She Was Like That:

"A fascinatingly integrated story collection...Mother love brings strange moments of what can only be called grace, moments Walbert captures with an unusual combination of restraint and rhapsody." —Claire Dederer, The New York Times Book Review

“In this evocative collection, the love of women for their children can provide salvation or a trap. Or both, at the same time. Walbert captures maternal love and its moments of grace with an unusual combination of restraint and rhapsody.”—The New York Times, Editors’ Choice

"A striking, often melancholy collection [that] grapples with the joys and anxieties of motherhood."—Minneapolis Star Tribune

"An intense look at women searching — often fruitlessly — for companionship, while striving to hold on to their dreams."—Cory Oldweiler, AM New York

“This is a piercing, intimate, and exquisite collection.”—Publishers Weekly

"Tales of spare, unflinching beauty show how love and loneliness can occupy a heart together.” —Kirkus Reviews

“I loved these stories, wide-open, varied, generous, warm, funny.”—Tessa Hadley, author of Late in the Day

“Kate Walbert is inarguably one of our foremost chroniclers of the existential dilemma of being not just a woman, but a human. With astonishing precision, alive and alert to the complications embedded in even the simplest exchange, Walbert slips into the fissures and fault lines of her utterly compelling characters doing the best of what a writer can do: she makes the familiar strange, and in doing so, reveals the glorious complexity of a world we only think we know.”—Marisa Silver, author of Mary Coin