This collection of brief sketches alternating with longer fictions hasn't the structure of a novel; but it has a novel's heft, as characters who are just names in one story emerge to take center stage in another. These women's lives are shaped by fate and by place, forces hauntingly evoked by this talented young writer.
(Boston Globe)
The stories in Michelle Richmond's first collection spin artfully off the life of a single character... smart and adept.
(The New York Times)
Richmond's writing is perceptive and heartfelt, her subjects at once edgy and familiar. This is a winning debut.
(Publishers Weekly)
The Girl in the Fall-Away Dress is a stunning collection filled with heart-stopping moments of such raw emotion that I am left with a vivid array of visions long remembered afterward. There is humor, there is grief -- the author skillfully keeping us in that precious spot between the two, so that we are always aware of the fragile filaments linking one experience to another.
(Jill McCorkle)
Remember this name: Michelle Richmond...impressive talent and emotional range...Richmond writes with grace, calm, a refreshing sense of playfulness.
(The San Francisco Chronicle)
One of the best story collections I've read in awhile...Richmond's collection might arguably be read as a novel...masterful.
(The Journal of the Alabama Writers Forum)
A talented writer to watch...[Richmond's] writing can be spare, poetic...as she carefully interweaves the mundane and the absurd.
(The Mobile Register)
Richmond's 19 charming and accessible short stories, ranging from a punchy single page to a complex 20 pages in length, make up a short-story cycle that revolves primarily around a single family. Presented in a varied and staggered pattern through the points of view of three daughters, the stories recount the family's growth, trials, and tribulations in an almost Joycean, interlocking, family-epic manner: birth and motherhood; religion and education; pain, disease, and death; homosexuality and the splintering of the family. The final effect of this collection of stories is like the feeling of a rising crescendo that one gets from reading a complex contemporary novel...An excellent read, this well-written and thoroughly fascinating short-story cycle is recommended for public libraries and for all academic collections supporting the study of fiction writing.
(Choice) From the Author
I'm very excited to make my first book, The Girl in the Fall-Away Dress, available in paperback for the first time. The stories in this collection were written over a period of eight years, in a series of houses and apartments in Tuscaloosa, Knoxville, Fayetteville (Arkansas), Miami, New York City, and San Francisco. Several of them are coming-of-age stories, and all are very deeply rooted in my experiences of the South and the journeys I undertook in my early twenties.
During the years when I was writing these stories, I was by a student, a tanning salon receptionist, an advertising copywriter, a seller of credit card processing machines, and a private tutor for the president of a Chinese trading company. I plugged away at these stories from job to job, state to state, hoping desperately that they would one day be published. At the time, I didn't dare dream that I would be able to make a life of writing. The Year of Fog was many years in the future, and I saw myself as a short-story writer, not a novelist. Eleven years after the book's publication by University of Massachusetts Press, my life as a writer has taken me places I never would have imagined. But to this day, given a long afternoon, a cup of coffee, and choice between a novel and a story collection, you will find me reading stories.
About the Author
Michelle Richmond grew up in Alabama. She lives in San Francisco, where she teaches writing. Richmond has been a finalist for both the Bakeless Prize and the Willa Cather Fiction Prize. She received a B.A. from the University of Alabama (1992) and an M.F.A. from the University of Miami (1998). Richmond has received fellowships from the James Michener Foundation, the Constance Saltonstall Foundation, and the Millay Colony for the Arts.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
We're driving through the Lincoln Tunnel en route to Jersey when Ivan turns off the tape player and puts his hand on my thigh. I know what this means. It means he's gearing up to tell me the story. He'll be telling it in a way that suggests he has never told me this story before, that he has never told it to anyone, that it's coming to me straight from his heart, where he has saved it all these years. Each time the story is a little different; he adds or subtracts a few details, spruces up the dialogue, increases or decreases the temperature of that March day in northern California by a couple of degrees. Every time he tells the story, he has a new hook, an improved first line. This whole day has been planned in homage to that story, the story of the greatest moment of his life. We've rented a car and are on our way to Asbury Park. It occurs to me that this is the day I'm going to break up with him; there is no more putting it off. After four years, it seems fitting that we should end our relationship in Asbury Park on the occasion of his second pilgrimage, and it seems somehow more civil than if I were to break the news to him anywhere else--over dessert at Edgar's, say, or in bed at our Eighty-fifth Street apartment.
