American Grief in Four Stages: Stories

by Sadie Hoagland

American Grief in Four Stages is a collection of stories that imagines trauma as a space in which language fails us and narrative escapes us. These stories play with form and explore the impossibility of elegy and the inability of our culture to communicate grief, or sympathy, outside of cliché. One narrator, for example, tries to understand her brother’s suicide by excavating his use of idioms. Other stories construe grief and trauma in much subtler ways—the passing of an era or of a daughter’s childhood, the seduction of a neighbor, the inability to have children. From a dinner party with Aztecs to an elderly shut-in’s recollection of her role in the Salem witch trials, these are stories that defy expectations and enrich the imagination. As a whole, this collection asks the reader to envisage the ways in which we suffer as both unbearably painful and unbearably American.

Genres: Short Stories

168 pages, Paperback

First published October 2, 2019

About the author

Sadie Hoagland is the author of Strange Children, a novel coming out in May 2021 and of American Grief in Four Stages, a collection of stories that earned a Kirkus Star and was named one of the 20 best debuts of the second half of 2019 by Electric Lit. The collection explores the inability of our culture to communicate grief, or sympathy, outside of cliché. Her novel, Strange Children, is forthcoming from Red Hen Press. She has a PhD in fiction from the University of Utah and an MA in Creative Writing/Fiction from UC Davis. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Alice Blue Review, The Black Herald, Mikrokosmos Journal, South Dakota Review, Sakura Review, Grist Journal, Oyez Review, Passages North, Five Points, The Fabulist, South Carolina Review and elsewhere. She is a former editor of Quarterly West, and currently teaches fiction at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette where she also lives with her family, and they do their best to eat beignets whenever they can.

Reviews

[Matty · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very emotional read as I have witnessed and experienced tragic events and loss in my life that I am still grieving 20 years later. The book shows there are many ways to process grief and loss and there is not one specific way to do it. Each narrator tells their own story and shows different ways we chose to cope and process grief. Grief is connected to memory and sometimes the memory can overtake what actually happened. Well done Sadie!

[Rubery Book Award · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rubery Book Award Shortlisted (2020)

The opening piece, Cavelier Presentations, is about a woman who sleeps with a neighbour in order to realise a fantasy from her past: her former crush on an older man, Mr Blue. The desire to make this real is born of a need to escape her mother's lack of sensitivity, and the bald reality of her own illness. It's an imaginative and psychologically convincing story, immensely enjoyable. The second piece, set in seventeenth century Salem, explores the nebulous boundaries between superstition and madness in an original and evocative way. Hoagland uses metaphor to hint at the difficulties underpinning relationships, and the hard-to-define fears that impact on her characters' lives. Considering the theme of these short stories is trauma, loss and suffering, these are beautifully written, intelligent and complex, and successfully experimental. She's a very talented writer, and this is a high-quality collection that includes several stunning stories, setting the bar very high with the opening stories.


www.ruberybookaward.com

[Wendy Lu · Rating 4 out of 5]

this was like, idk, eating fucking truffles or something. short-form fiction isn't something i read a lot just because i have a hard time either getting into the story or feeling a sense of completion walking away from the story, but i found this collection really, really easy to get into and really, really easy to enjoy. i ended up reading this in a lot of little sittings. right as the pandemic started in the states, i started working from home and living alone all at once, which was a little bit hard. not awful or unmanageable or anything! so whenever i found myself feeling a little bluesy or quiet, i would pick this up and read one of the stories and it was really, really nice. the writing is so tight and filled with this quiet emotion that came in waves and was just really soothing. loved this lots :)

[Candace · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book. I cried and laughed and felt jealous of characters and at times felt sick to my stomach. I picked up this book thinking it was non-fiction in a frenzy of half read synopsis. I’m so glad this book exists. It’s exploration of grief through these short stories that somehow you are dropped right into the middle of and remain completely attached to at the end of each one is such a gift. There’s a bit of grief endured at the end of each story as i didn’t want them to end (even the two page long stories) and then you start the next and that storyline pulls at your heart strings just as deeply. Wow.

[Robert · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is amazing. These voice-driven stories, at once harrowing and quirky and elegant, remind us not simply that tragedy is commonplace. Rather than stopping (and potentially wallowing) in a fetishized moment of tragedy, the book mines the complicated ways through which grief and loss drive how we make sense of the world, and write themselves, despite us, into the dna of our behaviors. Highest recommendation!

[Ace Boggess · Rating 5 out of 5]

These stories are filled with thriving, lyrical, sometimes-experimental prose. They invoke grief, but show more of the unconscious ways humans deal with it. The stories flow so smoothly that the reader never loses interest. My personal favorite, "F*&king Aztecs," was unlike anything I had read before, and the book is worth buying just for that. A truly excellent collection.

[Marcia · Rating 4 out of 5]

As others have said, the title should give you a heads up as to what’s ahead. Some of these stories are amazing (Father/Writer). Others could have been left out and the collection would not have suffered the loss (Origins). On the whole the collection, in all its darkness, is a solid 4 stars.

[Tiara Knight · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.75

[Harper K · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5

[Joanne H · Rating 3 out of 5]

I couldn’t finish it, not my type of reading . The tittle captured my interest but could not pass the firsts few chapters , try few other stories but still did not really get it. Good writing but not mu type of stories.

[Cassandra · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great short stories that capture love, grief, and sadness well. I’ll be rereading many of these!

[Michelle · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some stories were amazing. Others ok. Overall a talented writer.

[Vel Veeter]

I read this book in one go at the coffee shop. It’s short and small in size, so it lends itself to this kind of reading. The stories are not linked by common physical connections, but there’s some thematic elements that worm their way through a lot of the stories. A motif in this collective review, however, is where the marketing and positioning of the book get in the way of the book itself. That’s a failure on my part too, of course, but it’s annoying to be much about a story collection other than “Hey, these are pretty good!” But once you start getting into thematic connections without there being a direct purposeful connection like in The Things they Carried or Olive Kitteridge you’re doing a disservice to the book and the readers.

There’s a tonal connection here, though, that I think is pretty characteristic. Imagine something a few notches less dark than Ottessa Moshfegh, and I think that’s about the tone here. I generally hate the idea that I need to relate, identify with, or worst, like a character I am reading about and the clarity and directness of these characters is nice in that way. The author is not pulling punches, and so a character making some very destructive choices, personal or emotional, and not having the page count to get themselves out of things in time works just fine for me. There’s theme within here of 20s of a person’s life being especially chaotic and I found that to be true in my own life, and find it to be true here, so that’s effective and fetching about the stories. There’s less concern about these moments being remotely charming.