by Rachel León
November 1, 2021
Rachel León’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Chicago Review of Books, Fiction Writers Review, Nurture, Entropy, (mac)ro(mic), and The Rupture. She was a 2020-2021 fellow at Stony Brook University’s BookEnds Program and is the Reviews Editor for West Trade Review.
Admit This to No One: Collected Stories by Leslie Pietrzyk; The Unnamed Press; 257 pages; $18
Our values can shape our lives. What we believe to be fair, moral, and of worth, affects what we do, where we live, and how we interact with people. This is rich fodder for fiction, which Leslie Pietrzyk taps into in her new story collection, Admit This to No One. While the female characters are connected by an influential political figure, they are bound tighter by the ways they confront value: their own worth, money, their ethics, and how much they matter to a man. Typically, the man in question is the Speaker of the House, an elusive character whose presence looms large throughout the collection.
The first story, “’Til Death Do Us Part,” is narrated by the Speaker’s fifteen-year-old daughter, Madison, who is meeting her father for their monthly dinner, and through her unfiltered cheeky teenage voice, we learn about the Speaker’s career, his failed marriages, a sex scandal that gets outshined by his professions of atheism, and his lack of true involvement in her life. The story’s startling ending becomes the impetus for Lexi, the Speaker’s oldest daughter, to drive to Washington, D.C. on her fortieth birthday to see her estranged father in “Stay There.” Two later stories, “My Father Raised Me” and “Kill the Fatted Calf,” continue Lexi’s journey—which is both a literal one, and an emotional reckoning. In addition to facing her value as a woman in her forties, she is wrestling with a sex scandal of her own, a new desire for a baby, her career as an artist, and how unimportant she feels to her father. While not all the stories deal directly with the incident at the end of “’Til Death Do Us Part,” the effects of it are seen throughout the collection, including in two that revisit Madison in the future.
The Speaker’s perspective is offered once in the collection, in “We Always Start with the Seduction,” which carries such precision in its construction that the final line is both surprising and inevitable. The story exudes control, both on a sentence level and in the Speaker’s actions. Everything feels calculated, the cost of each action clear:
But a dose of old-fashioned flirting seems to harm no one, tiptoeing up to and along a defined line everyone agrees won’t be crossed. These girls, trained in hook-ups and dance floor grinding, don’t find enough joy in meaningful glances across the sea of navy blue at a tedious reception or the pleasure of clinging longer than necessary to a handshake at a conference table or fingers lightly grazing a jacketed shoulder (never bare skin!) to emphasize a point. He’s married, perpetually married, always with one wife or another. So the speaker flirts, and everyone on the Hill knows this. Flirting is an art, a game to play where, for once, the objective isn’t winning. Possibly this is the only game like that the Speaker knows.
Power is a strong central theme throughout this collection. Aside from the obvious power we see from the Speaker and his position, more covert forms appear—namely, misogyny and white supremacy. In “People Love a View,” a White couple on a first date watch a Black man get pulled over by the police, and the woman’s misplaced desire to safeguard the situation by filming the interaction on her cell phone becomes an interference with terrible consequences. One of the shortest stories in the collection, “This Isn’t Who We Are,” is one of the most cutting for White liberal readers as it examines a White woman’s true inner feelings behind her outward actions through a second person narrator:
Pretend you aren’t thinking you’re also “brave” when you pass through a sprawl of Black teenage boys clad in hoodies (winter) or tank tops (summer) or T-shirts imprinted with the face of a dead Black man or boy (any season) on the street where you walk daily in your historic suburban town’s shopping district. Pretend that they bother noticing a drab,
middle-aged white woman wearing lavender running shoes purchased with a coupon at a strip mall DSW. Pretend they’re examining you closely with the male gaze. Pretend you’re fine with that. Pretend your breathing doesn’t race just a tiny, tiny bit. Pretend you wanted to walk this fast for cardio.
This story ends with a sharp last line, one delivering such heavy impact that it lingers after its conclusion, which Pietrzyk does remarkably well in this collection. These are not stories easily forgotten.
Short stories rely on compression, and it’s hard to deny Pietrzyk’s skill in this arena. Each one opens with a compelling first line that sucks you in, as well as an original premise. Often stories can feel familiar, but these fourteen feel fresh. There is an urgency, especially those that examine daily oppressions and the intersection of personal and political beliefs.
The setting of Washington, D.C., works well as the city appears divided—not only politically, but racially and socioeconomically—in a way that mirrors the internal division many of these characters contend with. Many of these women present as tough and frank, yet under the surface are vulnerable and lost, questioning their worth in a misogynistic society, while also sometimes grappling with their own role in the oppression of others. The characters, particularly Lexi and Madison, are layered and complex, feeling both real and relatable.
Pietrzyk is a master of craft and this collection is a fitting showcase for her talents: from voice and character development to plot, pacing, and theme. Typically, point of view is well executed, though the decision in “We Always Start with the Seduction” and “People Love a View” to offer a glimpse at the female characters’ viewpoint via male characters’ perspectives is arguably less effective than if perspective and point of view were united. But both are so resonant that any flaw is outshined by the story.
Admit This to No One is an undeniably noteworthy story collection, one that is both timely and timeless. These fourteen stories illuminate uncomfortable truths and force us to consider the value we place on ourselves and others, and how that plays out in our own lives.
©2021 West Trade Review
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Value and Uncomfortable Truths in Leslie Pietrzyk’s Admit This to No One
FICTION REVIEW
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