I just finished reading Touchy Subjects by Emma Donoghue. It's a collection of 19 short stories separated into five categories that can be touchy subjects—Babies, Domesticity, Strangers, Desire, and Death—and there's also a story by that name, in which a man tries to help his wife's best friend conceive a child by making a sperm donation in her hotel room (not directly inside her) while she's visiting their city.
Donoghue is a lesbian, and several of the stories have LGBT1 characters. The stories tend to end rather abruptly yet decisively. I enjoyed most of them a good deal, though that title story ultimately didn't seem credible: I can't imagine a woman allowing her best friend to raise a child who would be a half sibling to her own children. Nor a man being willing to father his wife's best friend's child. Nor a woman asking her best friend to let her husband be her sperm donor.
Two of my favorite stories were found in the Desire section: "Team Men," about a romance between two high school jocks, only one of whom wants to come out of the closet, and "Speaking in Tongues," about a whirlwind fling between a lesbian poet and a much younger woman told alternatingly from each of their perspectives.
The thing I found most impressive about the collection was the wide variety of characters whose viewpoints Donoghue presented. I'm inclined to read one of her novels at some point, perhaps Frog Music, which I saw was at my local library when I returned Touchy Subjects today. But I'm still reading another novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin, so I picked up a collection of short stories instead: Lucky Alan and Other Stories by Jonathan Lethem.
I'm now going to point out two little errors I found in Touchy Subjects, because that's one of the things I tend to do on this blog. My usual disclaimer remains in effect: I don't claim to be perfect, and I'm pointing out these errors in a spirit of helpful criticism, not know-it-all-ness. And these really are tiny mistakes.
In the story called "Oops," which is in the Babies section, in the third line from the bottom in the photo above, "insisting" should be "insisted."
And in the story called "Pluck," from the Domesticity section, the following problematic sentence appeared: "It turned out that a hair was a filament or a filamentous outgrowth that grew from the integument of an animal or insect." Insects are animals, so mammal is a better word to use than animal.
1There's a SPOILER for the story "The Welcome" in this footnoted gripe: The book jacket summarizes that story thusly: "A roommate's bizarre secret awakens a repressed young woman." That's poorly worded both because the young woman in question is turned on by her roommate before she learns what the roommate's secret is and because the woman she is attracted to turns out to be transgender and being transgender shouldn't be described as "bizarre." I will acknowledge that this book was published in 2006, before many of us, including me, were educated about what it means to be transgender. And I should note that the story itself doesn't present being transgender as bizarre.