Amy Stuber and I have crossed paths many times, so I was thrilled when I saw her tweet announcing her debut short story collection, Sad Grownups (Stillhouse Press, 2024). The tweet got a lot of attention, not just because of the known talent of its author but because of her age: she was more than fifty at the time of her book’s acceptance. I also debuted a story collection later in life, and I was excited for Amy—an excitement compounded by what I knew of her work. Nothing, however, could have prepared me for the excitement of reading Sad Grownups, a collection of stories filled with people, and the world they live in, on the edge of ruin. Through curious magic, Amy summons the electricity in ennui, the inspiration in despair. If you don’t find it in the tale, you’ll find it in the telling. Stuber’s language is as startling and bright as a patch of blue bursting through the gray of an overcast sky.
Stuber and I exchanged a series of emails, where we discussed the composition of Sad Grownups, the decomposition of the planet, landscapes, buildings, and bodies, and her thoughts on sadness and beauty, disassociation and transcendence, and stifling socioeconomic norms mixed in along the way.
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The Rumpus: The title Sad Grownups, which comes from the titular story, is perfect for this book. Did you know this was your book title from the start, or did it take time to get there?
Amy Stuber: I’m terrible at titles. This collection, which has had about five different iterations in the last five years—with flash, without flash, with older stories, without, etcetera—had many titles prior to this one. When I thought about submitting the book to small presses, I realized the story “Sad Grownups” was, in many ways, the thematic centerpoint of the book. The two “childhood geniuses” who are the focus of that story have so much hope for doing interesting, meaningful things, but they end up doing mainly nothing as they enter into the first part of adulthood. Their childhoods of expectation and emotional stuntedness have made them ill-prepared for grownup life.
On their periphery, below the attic where they spend their time, one of their mothers is often hanging out, dancing and drinking in the living room with her sister, kind of stuck and probably isolated in her own way but finding ways to make it work. She’s in no way some intentional role model, but she does represent something unintentionally aspirational for her kid and what I think the book is kind of about: carting your childhood stuff around, the grievances, the trauma, the disappointments and difficulties, but trying to find spaces where you can be okay each day, maybe even finding moments of joy and freedom that exist outside the insistent spheres of “make something” and “do something.” So the title “Sad Grownups” is half literal and half tongue-in-cheek.
Unfortunately, I’m a bit of a sad grownup, often weighted down by nostalgia and melancholy. There are days when I can’t walk around town at dusk without feeling pummeled by the sadness of something trivial, like a lace curtain across someone’s window or a dying plant on a step is going to knock me over. But then something shakes me out of it—an owl, the sky, my kid saying something, a line from a poem or story, just anything—and reminds me of the duality of life, the sad–beautiful, which is my favorite combination in writing and one I hope to achieve.
Rumpus: The combination of sadness and beauty threads through the book, most powerfully in “Cinema,” a story notable for the harrowing personal history it discloses alongside the details it leaves out. “Doctor Visit” also withholds information. How does the unsaid inform your work?
Stuber: When I was a young child, my dad’s extended family died in a house fire. The effects of this, as well as some other tragedies in our extended family, rippled through our family for many years. There were a lot of unspoken sadnesses, and it often felt like if you knocked against anything too hard, everyone would disassemble. It made me feel simultaneously too porous and untouchable and created in me a propensity for self-destruction that lasted well into adulthood. Also, I struggled with postpartum depression that was pretty severe after the births of both of my kids. At the time, I read about a woman in the town where I lived, someone struggling with postpartum psychosis, who was experiencing intense hallucinations and who died by suicide soon after childbirth. It was so tragic and haunting to read about how her mind had been completely altered, how she was totally foreign to herself, and the story stuck with me for years.
The main character in “Cinema” is flayed by life, opened up, vulnerable, thus capable of being destroyed by almost anything but also weirdly impermeable because the worst has happened, and she’s found herself on the other side.
Anyway, a lot of the characters I write are experiencing a self-inflicted disassociation to a certain degree because there’s something that’s happened to them or they’ve done that they can’t look right at, so it’s easier and better to avert their attention in ways that sometimes involve self-erasure and sometimes involve self-destruction, as is true for the main character in “Doctor Visit.” Some of the most sad–beautiful moments in writing occur when there’s a temporary release from heady emotion or from self-focus, when the character is able to see the world as bigger and more beautiful than self.
Rumpus: The relationship between self and narrative, or the way we define ourselves by the stories we tell, is found in many other stories in the collection, such as “Day Hike,” “Dead Animals,” and “Dick Cheney Was Not My Father.” They all stake territory in the meta, exploring storytelling as a malleable construct rather than a firm record of reality. What drives your interest in the meta?
Stuber: The very honest answers are: (1) traditional plot often eludes me—though I try!—and (2) I was bored by my own tendencies to write too internal or too static. I tried to focus on what was happening to characters, to have a tight focus on their movement and trajectory. But when completed, those stories seemed to lack something, some element or layer to make them feel unique or worth telling. I started toying with adding in another layer or element: a metanarrative or some repetition or shift that causes you to question the story’s premise or reality.
Also, sometimes I write almost by feel, like stacking up objects on a table, stepping back to assess how they look and feel in relation to each other, moving things around. I usually go into a story with a feel for a situation or a character or a place more than an actual storyline. And if I get the pieces in place and they feel lacking, I want to think of a way to move or twist them so I can see them in another way. In “Doctor Visit,” I started writing the story in a traditional way, about this woman and a single memory of a tragedy, but then I saw this repetition in her life, this storyline she made for herself: what she was being told was her decaying body alongside what she was being told about her body as sex object. And because repeating those scenes underlined their emotion, it became clear the story should also retell the tragedy but maybe a little differently each time.
As much as anything, the stories you mentioned are probably about the unreliability of perception and memory and how we, the often very unreliable narrators of our own lives, shape versions of ourselves steeped in a sometimes ridiculous or inaccurate mythology we’ve created. The use of meta elements within these stories is probably to toy with ideas of fragmentation but also from a more intuitive kind of filmy place of “Does this feel right? No? Okay, it needs another component.”
Rumpus: Many of your stories grapple with, and often cut against, the mythos of motherhood. How do these characters’ personal mythologies converse with larger social mythologies?
Stuber: When I was growing up in the eighties in a Kansas City suburb, motherhood and femininity looked limiting and unappealing. You could be assessed for your appearance, deemed suitable or not, objectified, reduced to a stereotype in one way or another, and boxed up and dismissed. I was uninterested, at first, in coupling and motherhood. I did have kids at thirty-six and thirty-nine, and I’m so glad I did—they’re incredible. But I don’t think motherhood is a requirement for a fulfilled life, and I also think people who presume motherhood will bring them instant happiness may be shocked when confronted with some aspects of the day-to-day of it.
The same seems to be true of the current state of capitalism and the options it offers to us: pretend the world isn’t collapsing around us while we distract ourselves with consumption. I just don’t want that, but I also feel entrapped by it.
Some of the characters in the book are trying to create lives with meaning while functioning within these social realities, and that often feels impossible for them. Instead of being able to find some sustained narrative or prolonged meaning, the meaning is more elliptical. I’m not trying to suggest that it’s impossible to find happiness in today’s America but more that the current systems seem designed to leave us wanting.
Rumpus: That sense of the world collapsing looms over this collection. Though many societal challenges have persisted from the eighties of your youth, the world, in some ways, has changed a lot since then. You’ve been writing for a long time. Over the years, what concerns have remained constant for you and what concerns have changed?
Stuber: I’ve been worried about climate change—now crisis—for decades, and climate issues have obviously just gotten worse. It’s one thing to write about something that you think might improve with the right human behaviors, as we thought in the eighties and nineties, and it’s something else to consider living in a world past that window for possible saving. It brings both a sense of terror and abandon.
About twenty or so years ago, I saw an exhibit of William Christenberry’s work—he does these photo series that display a structure decaying over time. He might show a small-town building in a functional state first and then subsequent photos over years, as the building is taken over by vines and crumbling. I thought about these photos for a long time after seeing the show, mainly probably because they really spoke to my interest in the way a landscape changes over time, watching one object or one house or block change over months and years.
I walk a lot. It’s really the thing that brought me to some form of mental health, helped me cope with a long-term eating disorder, consistently brings me some peace of mind, and helps me think about writing and stories. I like to walk in places where there’s a lot of imprecision and where I can take note of, for example, the way someone moves things around a yard over the course of a summer or the way a decaying house slowly collapses over years. My daughter recently asked me what I like about Kansas’s landscapes, and I think this is one of the things: the way it’s not overtly “stunning,” like a clearly beautiful oceanscape or canyon, and how you really have to zero in on the subtleties and details to see its appeal sometimes.
Anyway, as I age, I’m thinking more and more about that decomposition around me but also decomposition on a personal level. Of course, we’re all dying, blah blah blah. But getting closer to older age, having people the generation above get closer to death and then die, it really changes your perspective on living, on art’s role in life, on the need for immediacy, the need for success and accomplishment, etcetera. So while I’ve always written about the inhospitable nature of America and the dissonance of living in a place that refuses to really respond in a meaningful way—on governmental and corporate levels—to this doom right in front of us, to all the ways we are hurting ourselves and each other, it’s very different to write about it when I’m more actively decomposing: with graying hair and weird veins appearing on my shins and hands that look like my long-gone grandmother’s suddenly.
I know a lot of classic narrative arcs follow a person in crisis, a person falling apart temporarily, a person then possibly finding redemption that carries them out of harm’s way, but it’s weird to live in an age where we all feel like any respite or redemption is very transient. I know all populations have had their lurking crises, and many of them were viewed as potentially world-ending, so maybe this is no different. But I think being in the thick of it has reflected in my work. I’ve tried to get that immediacy, even low-level panic, more into some of my stories. I’m not always successful at it, and something I am always struggling against is a tendency to make a story that’s just a static situation—which maybe reflects how I sometimes feel: stuck, ineffectual—into something moving and fluid and dynamic. In the last ten years, and in these stories, I’ve made a more conscious effort for movement and insistence as kind of an antidote to the hovering worry.
Rumpus: What considerations shaped how you ordered the stories?
Stuber: I struggled with order. I reordered this many times before sending it out. I made so many different lists of keywords about these stories to try to see the connections and a natural order, like considering setting, narrative arc, gender, tone, etcetera for each story and then working to make sure there was variety from one to the next. I couldn’t get it right, and I had trouble having the objectivity necessary to see what would make the most sense, where the movement was or should be. I actually just went back to look at the original order, the way the book was when I sent it to Stillhouse, and the current first two stories were, in that earlier version, totally buried in the book’s final third. My editor, Rebecca Burke, presented a new story order when she sent first-round edits to me, and I’m so grateful she did. I mostly went with what she suggested but moved things around a little where I thought a couple stories might be better next to each other or where maybe one should come later. I hope the order as it stands gives the collection movement on a macro level. One person who read the book after it was reordered called it “humane,” and that’s maybe been the best compliment? That’s my goal for this, for people who read it to feel something for these characters and then feel something for or about themselves.
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Author photograph by Matt Patterson
