Short story collections usually mean hits and misses – it’s rare that I rave about a whole collection (the last time was here). Games and Rituals by Katherine Heiny is absolutely worth raving about.

There are eleven stories in the collection, all focused on the theme of love, and the various forms it takes – friendships, ex-husbands, parents and children, and ill-advised trysts. And all eleven stories are funny. Not necessarily laugh-out-loud funny (although I did) but the wry smile kind of funny. Deadpan funny. And I felt like the humour was just for me because everything Heiny writes about peri menopause, parenting teenagers, bridesmaids’ dresses, dealing with ageing parents and the little stuff that I lose my shit over, was exactly right.

She told William…she was in perimenopause. She had given him a printed checklist of thirty-four symptoms of perimenopause: irritability, lack of libido, hot flashes, mood swings, headaches, constipation, gum problems, tingling extremities, fatigue, dizziness, burning tongue… She had checked every single box except incontinence.
Two days later, she asked him for the list back and checked the incontinence box, too.

And there was also stuff that made me laugh because it was so weirdly specific – someone disliking their neighbour because they forced them to go to a Colour Me Beautiful party in the eighties, and another who thought their friend was making a bad choice of husband but notes, “….also, she has a pocket in her wedding dress, which is very unusual…” (Pockets in dresses are essential – wish I’d thought of that for my wedding dress).

There are some standouts – in Bridesmaid, Revisited, Marilee is suffering from a laundry and life crisis, and wears a huge taffeta bridesmaid’s dress to work which, as she sets up the projector for a staff meeting, ‘…rustles like a palm tree in a typhoon.‘

In Damascus, a woman’s ex-husband asks her to drop by his office after-hours to sign some papers. All straight forward. However they end up doing a line of cocaine and having sex.

First she felt, then she felt cold, then she had a profound idea that would revolutionize the way she did laundry.
“Give me a notebook,” she said to Jack-Henry. “I need to write this down.”
“Later,” Jack-Henry said, sliding his hand up her skirt.
“I can take notes while you do that,” said Mia, who now felt capable of anything, including multitasking. So Jack-Henry gave her a legal pad and a fountain pen and put his hand under her skirt again… Mia made a quick drawing of her laundry room with arrows showing the route dirty clothes would take on their way to sparkling clean in her new system. She sketched three laundry baskets and next to the third one, she wrote VERY IMPORTANT! DON’T FORGET! and circled it several times. (She would have no memory of the importance later.)
Then she put the legal pad aside, unzipped Jack-Henry’s trousers, and they got it on.

Twist and Shout made me laugh and cry. Ericka’s cranky elderly father mistakes his $4000 hearing aid for a cashew and eats it. Naturally Ericka has to organise a replacement and it is far from straightforward.

This simple event contains multitudes: sorrow and entitlement and love and annoyance. It also contains the four separate appointments – assessment, hearing test, fitting, programming – you made and took him to in order to get the hearing aid in the first place. He’s not even supposed to be eating cashews! He has high blood pressure!

Without spoilers, this is pretty much a perfect short story.

And lastly, we meet empty-nesters, William and his Marie-Kondo-obsessed wife in CobRa –

William’s wife’s name was Rachel Coburn, so her Japanese nickname would be (or could be, sort of) CobRa. William told her this, however unwisely. He was trying to make jokes, trying to spark joy. It was in short supply lately.

As Rachel ‘KonMari-s’ their house, William wonders if there is much more she can give up and still remain the person he’d married. The decluttering continues, but he draws the line when she reaches for his books –

William had done many shameful things out of his love for CobRa – he had agreed turkey meatballs were as good as regular, he had watched all of Scandal, he had briefly grown a mustache which made him look like Dr. Phil – but he refused to do this. He told CobRa she had to keep all the books with his name written on the flyleaf…

In all of the stories, Heiny demonstrates how to create normal, believable characters while maintaining tension and humour and startlingly good writing. Guaranteed to brighten your day.

4.5/5

I received my copy of Games and Rituals from the publisher, Harper Collins Australia (and Knopf), via NetGalley, in exchange for an honest review.

She ate one meal a day, at lunchtime – ham-and-cheese-roll-ups drizzled with honey. Otherwise she drank can after can of Diet Coke in the morning, and then about mid-afternoon she switched to mango margaritas, and the margaritas saw her out. She said this was pandemic behaviour, but the only kitchen equipment she brought with her when she moved in was her blender and her alternate blender so it might have been more deep-rooted than that.