Admit This to No One: Collected Stories

by Leslie Pietrzyk

In Admit This to No One, we meet a group of women connected to a central figure either personally or professionally, and for better or for worse―an all-powerful and elusive Speaker of the House, whose political career has only stopped short of being Presidential due to his myriad extra-marital affairs. The Speaker’s daughters from his several failed marriages have a complicated relationship with him to say the least―alternating between longing for his affection or bristling with resentment, and occasionally relief at being left out of the spotlight.

His oldest daughter Lexie, from his “real family, the first one,” once his favorite who knew the real him, is now an adult who has blown up her career due to a sex scandal of her own. His long-time fixer and keeper of secrets, Mary-Grace, is relentless and uncompromising in her devotion to him, making the lives of the interns and aides under her purview in the Capitol miserable. When the Speaker’s life is in danger, the disparate women in his life will collide for the first time, but can their relationships be repaired?

These stories show us how Washington, D.C.’s true currency is power, but power is inextricable from oppression―D.C. is a city divided, not just by red or blue, right or left, but Black and white. Segregated by income and opportunity, but also physically by bridges and rivers, and police vehicles, Leslie Pietrzyk casts an unflinching and exacting gaze on her characters, as they grapple with the ways they have upheld white supremacy and misogyny. Shocking and profound, Pietrzyk writes with an emotional urgency about what happens when the bonds of family and duty are pushed to the limit, and how if individuals re-evaluate their own beliefs and actions there is a path forward.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction

255 pages, Paperback

First published November 7, 2021

About the author

I am the author of Silver Girl, Pears on a Willow Tree and A Year and a Day (novels) and, most recently, Admit This to No One (short stories about official DC). My collection of linked stories about the death of my first husband, This Angel on My Chest, won the 2015 Drue Heinz Literature Prize and was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press. Short fiction & essays have appeared in Ploughshares, Iowa Review, Washington Post Magazine, Salon, Southern Review, Gettysburg Review, Hudson Review, The Sun, Shenandoah, Arts & Letters, Washingtonian, The Collagist, and Cincinnati Review. Oh, and one of my stories was awarded a 2020 Pushcart Prize--!!! I'm a member of the core fiction faculty at the Converse low-residency MFA program.

If I'm not writing, what I love most to do is cook...which is probably apparent from my books and stories, which are filled with food. Fun facts: Once I won the blue ribbon for chocolate chip cookies at the Virginia State Fair. Check out my website for a recipe for the best Thanksgiving stuffing in the world!

A guide for book clubs is posted on my website. Also...recipes!

Reviews

[Leslie Pietrzyk · Rating 5 out of 5]

I can't wait for this book to be out in the world of readers! At every step, I wanted to make the most challenging, most uncomfortable choice as a writer. (Well, maybe I eased up a tiny bit here and there.) Written during the pandemic, during political turmoil, I'll say this is my most urgent book, asking hard questions of all of us. I'll stop now, in case I start to sound biased.....

Merged review:

I can't wait for this book to be out in the world of readers! At every step, I wanted to make the most challenging, most uncomfortable choice as a writer. (Well, maybe I eased up a tiny bit here and there.) Written during the pandemic, during political turmoil, I'll say this is my most urgent book, asking hard questions of all of us. I'll stop now, in case I start to sound biased.....

[Sophie_The_Jedi_Knight]

This city holds things greater than me. Here's my freed-up heart, still beating and ready.

This was a collection of stories I don't think I'd have enjoyed as much on its own, but discussing it in my English class with everyone was really enjoyable. They all brought up a lot of things to talk about within them.

[Michelle Brafman · Rating 5 out of 5]

I inhaled ADMIT THIS TO NO ONE in a few sittings, and I'll probably read this beauty of a linked story collection again. This book is a fresh, timely, and clear-eyed look at what power looks and smells like. The particulars of the stories of the women whose lives intersect with one political leader (amazing composite character) will resonate with anyone who has ever faced power dynamics in a relationship. Plus, the social and political commentary is often laugh-aloud funny and always true. Leslie Pietrzyk is one of the most fearless, brilliant writers I've encountered.

[Clifford · Rating 5 out of 5]

I enjoyed this collection of linked short stories. They revolve--maybe orbit would be a better word--around an unlikable character who happens to be the Speaker of the House of Representatives, but the stories themselves are about some of the people around him--daughters from different marriages, his chief of staff, another staffer. Much of the book is set in Washington DC (like my own novel in stories, WHAT THE ZHANG BOYS KNOW) and because of the Speaker's position the stories are often about the power some people have over others and how that power is used. Terrific book.

[Statia · Rating 2 out of 5]

I am giving two stars for 1) the setting. As a Washingtonian, I like reading books that take place where I live because I connect with the locations, stereotypes, and illusions. And 2) the chapters that didn’t actually fit into the story, but felt like individual short stories were good. The portions about the Speaker of the House, his daughters, and Chief of Staff were so boring, loosely tied together, and actually confusing. I was speeding through the last half just to be done.

[Scarlett Harris · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loosely connected short stories that will make a certain kind of reader - white, middle class, “woke” - very uncomfortable

[Kai · Rating 3 out of 5]

Hard to follow. I kept thinking (hoping) the short stories would ultimately gel together and they did somewhat but then suddenly a story that feels random. The writing is really good though.

[Caroline Bock · Rating 5 out of 5]

This new collection of short stories is a must-read for 2022. Admit This To No One by Leslie Pietrzyk was published near the end of 2021, but there's an urgency to the writing that seems to make it 'of the moment.' Characters trying to figure out their lives, their work, the meaning (or lack of it) --all in the DC-area. Washington DC and its mores hang over these characters' lives, especially in my favorite, Carver-esque stories (it's worth reading the entire collection, but especially these two stories): "Wealth Management" and "Hat Trick." I also appreciated so much "This Isn't Who We Are" both for its detail of DC-area values and the awareness of a fiction writer struggling with what is true and what is fiction in these warped times. Read!!

Caroline

[John Vanderslice · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a great collection. As someone who grew up in the Washington, DC area, I am very familiar with many of the settings that the author uses in this book (e.g., the Wilson bridge, Capitol Hill, the Kennedy Center) and also familiar with the political and social climate of the area. So it was easy for me to warm up to these stories. But the stories are not just a matting of place setting. Far from it. These aren't just DC stories, but very good literary fiction. What I marvel at is how they are both extremely hard-bitten and deeply humane. Some of the most cynical characters--cynical in a characteristically DC way--reveal themselves to not be monsters (or not only monsters) in the end; some even, dare I say, are offered moments of redemption, something that I always find moving in stories. It's easy to be dark in storytelling; it's hard to be both dark and light at once. Pietrzyk is a master of that. What can I say? This is an extremely relevant book for our time, and it's superbly crafted.

[Jennifer Howard · Rating 5 out of 5]

I grew up in DC and live there now with my family. I'm not in politics, but am a longtime observer of how national politics intersects with personal and local lives. Leslie Pietrzyk brilliant captures the peculiar pressures and daily angsts of living cheek by jowl with power politics in this city as well as the tiny details of everyday life here.

[Tara Campbell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Once again, Pietrzyk combines keen observation with dry wit to craft evocative stories of power, privilege, corruption, and complicated relationships. Her protagonists are flawed but self-aware, capable of glimpsing the ways they simultaneously build themselves up and tear themselves down. The stories crackle with tension, taking on urgent questions of race and power--and the author isn't afraid to turn a critical lens toward her own role in these dynamics. I wanted to pace myself, extending the enjoyment, but I couldn't--I inhaled this book!

[Jacquelyn · Rating 5 out of 5]

A book of short stories that feels like a novel. Hard to put down as we follow the fortunes of the tarnished Speaker of the House and his damaged daughters, along with other stories of life in DC.

[Rachel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Part linked short stories about a fictional Speaker of the House and part autobiographical sketches about confronting race and class differences as a middle aged white woman, I guess this collection is unique? :P

If we’re speaking of admitting things, I don’t think I quite got the first story, “Till Death Do Us Part,” on first reading. I got that it was about the Speaker of the House meeting his estranged, 15-year-old daughter at the Kennedy Center as part of a custody arrangement. Madison was a bit too snarky for my tastes; there was something en media res about many of the openings of these stories that it took me a little while to catch up.

And good grief, I completely forgot about the explosive ending. :/ That’s probably more my fault. I was cramming too much in at the end of the month. I actually took a bit of a break between reading some of these stories.

Also, I wasn’t technically preparing for the novelistic aspect—the way that not only characters but also plot events have staying power—so that’s my silly excuse? :P

But yeah: Speaker of the House is a womanizer, and many of the stories follow the women in his orbit. There’s the young intern in “We Always Start with Seduction,” wide-eyed and daring, who nevertheless finds herself out of her emotional league once the Speaker puts his moves on her. Similarly, in “I Believe in Mary Worth,” Pietrzyk goes back and forth between the Speaker’s longtime fixer, Mary-Grace, and an intern in hot water after a drunken hook up. There’s an intriguing intensity between Mary-Grace trying to help a young woman vs Mary-Grace trying to manipulate the situation for the Speaker’s benefit.

His two daughters from two different failed marriages, Lexie and Maddison, were pretty similar in their quest for love in the Speaker’s emotional absence. I think Lexie spoke to me more, being older and wiser, even as she faffed around in her romantic relationships. Maybe it’s also about how all of her storylines have that throughline of her making her way from New York to DC after the shock ending of the first entry in this collection.

All of these stories could more or less be the products of DC’s particular brand of power hungry culture. (So I’m led to believe, being someone who works in DC but is on a very different trajectory. Maybe it’s obvious, since I live in the Maryland suburbs rather than Alexandria. :P)

But then we move onto something a little more broad, I think, when it comes to middle class white people awkwardly interacting with the oppression of others. “People Love a View” is the most fictionalized, chronicling an awkward first date getting cut short by police harassment of a Black person that goes in a shocking direction. (Warning for animal cruelty…and also my most visceral reaction. Was it the quality of Pietrzyk’s prose, or simply what she was describing?)

The woman in that story is overtly cringe worthy in her attempts to insert herself as an “ally.” I suppose something similar happens in “Green in Judgment,” where an author-insert tries to get a grocery line moving by awkwardly offering to pay for an impoverished woman’s cart. The real thing that didn’t work for me here was not so much the auto-fiction, but the skeletal meta-fiction that put strobe lights on the fourth wall of storytelling. Nothing feels real when you keep on telling us over and over again that it’s a conceit.

Then again, the most auto-fiction story, the second person “This Isn’t Who We Are,” worked for me. It was short enough that I didn’t get annoyed with the experimental aspect; instead, it worked its magic in making me feel (complicit?) empathy. Perhaps it helped, too, that Pietrzyk read aloud from this story at the Gaithersburg Book Festival. :P

My favorite story was “Hat Trick.” It had some similar associations—the DC feel when it came to the Caps game, the middle aged female protagonist looking back on the foibles of younger indiscretions as she reconnects with a chaotic college roommate. It was contained and yet it still packed a punch. Kinda like a short story. :P

[Kristi · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is not the book to read if you want to feel comfortable with yourself, racial equity, or the American government. As a resident of Minneapolis the story about the traffic stop of a Black man by a Washington, D. C. policeman raised the specter of George Floyd. The story is heart wrenching, but just when you believe you can predict the implications of the narrative, you have the behavior of the officer in his cruiser. One story happens entirely in a grocery check-out lane and addresses attitudes about Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) which was formerly called food stamps. Do we see those who need help with feeding families as equal or judged / resented? Why do we have to even think about how we feel about a woman using SNAP? Are we all not simply human beings? Most of the stories are linked concerning a Speaker of the House with four marriages. He was touted as presidential material, but his behavior has ruined his chances. In the first story he is attacked while dining with his 15-year-old daughter by a fanatic who hates the Speaker because he is an atheist. Lexie, his forty-year-old daughter hears the news and sets out to drive to D.C. to see her father. She is an artist and a child of the first marriage who has never recovered from the abandonment by her father. He touts her as the greatest loss of his life and says that she will only understand HIS loss when she has a daughter of her own. Mary Grace is the cut throat assistant of the Speaker who eliminates competition and believes she is the only person capable of handling his life and the 4 wives and families. She wants to deny Lexie access to her father at the hospital. Ms. Pietrzyk is such a great writer, that she generates shame, despair, and perhaps loss of hope in the reader. Her dialogue and character development are amazing. I fell in love with her writing with Pears on a Willow Tree and have avidly awaited each successive work. She is one of the best!! Kristi & Abby Tabby

[Travis · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is brilliant. Full stop.

Most of these characters I have very little in common with, and yet. And yet, at every turn you understand their humanity--their quirks and foibles. I think the greatest power, and the greatest gift, that a novel can provide, is allowing me to walk in someone else's shoes, to better understood them.

And this book has that in spades. Despite their, in some cases debilitating flaws, the characters in these stories grant us empathy and understanding.

In addition to all of these, the stories, through details and language and turns of phrase, transport us.

Highly recommended!

[Sonia · Rating 4 out of 5]

This loosely connected collection of short stories gives an insider's view of D.C. life . . . the messy tangle of personal/professional relationships, power struggles, people's sense of identity, and, of course, good old political scandal.

The stories are engrossing and insightful and the characters are well developed and psychologically complex. Admit This to No One is an entertaining read that shows us how the personal problems and struggles of those in D.C. really are no different from anywhere else in the country.

[Marlin Barton · Rating 5 out of 5]

Admit This to No One is a truly great collection of stories that not only takes us beneath the flag-waving surface of Washington, DC politics, it also takes us deep into the lives of the characters who live in and are consumed by that world. The stories are psychologically complex, but not in some clinical way. These stories breathe with life in the way that we expect from fine writers, and Pietrzyk certainly is one.

[Linda · Rating 5 out of 5]

Spell-binding linked stories about life in today's DC among the powerful and their families. The author obviously knows the scenes in which these people travel. She knows how to create affinity for the main character in each story, most of whom are women longing for something beyond their reach. I wanted to cry for them, hug them, and for one of two, shake them by the shoulders. Masterful collection.

[Erin · Rating 4 out of 5]

A well-written book of loosely connected, thought-provoking short stories about life in and around the DC metro area. It wasn't what I expected, nor was it really a book that I particularly enjoyed at times, but I would absolutely recommend it. Sometimes mirrors make us uncomfortable.

[Sara · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Your life builds around one core question, my father said, or was it one answer?"

Brilliant, beautifully written, painfully honest, funny collection of linked stories where DC looms larger than life. I loved this book! Pietrzyk is a powerhouse.

[Eva · Rating 5 out of 5]

I wish I could write strong, distinct voices like this author. They're so of-the-moment DC insider, and yet so lost and sad. I'm not sure yet if I actually liked any of the characters, but the writing was fully engaging, especially lines like this: "He knows that his secret, what keeps him going, is that tiny bit of wilderness still alive in his soul." So much of this book is the ugly truth, the three-o'clock-in-the-morning self-loathing, the most astute observations about the tiniest god-awful details. If "there's always power in the small and ordinary" then this book is potent beyond its 252 pages. Lexie, Mary Grace, and Madison will be inhabiting my mind for a while.

[Ramona · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a wholly original collection of interconnected stories set in the center of power in the U.S. The book tackles authority, ego, race, misogyny and more with fierce honesty and a refusal to look away, and it does so with writing that shines. This book reminded me that one reason I love the interconnected story form is because of its versatility. It’s always at the ready to explore place, community, and in this case, the ways in which lives collide to create cause and effect.

[Anna Leahy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Marvelous linked story collection. Complex characters in the political circles of Washington, DC, often in uncomfortable situations of their own making. I couldn’t put it down, finished it in a couple of days.

[Deborah Chapman · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book was very disjointed. The stories didn't seem to meld to me. I feel like there was no ending to the book, it just abruptly stopped during one of Maddie's stories. I wish I had abandoned that book.

[Robert Morgan Fisher · Rating 5 out of 5]

Outstanding collection set in Washington, DC. Linked stories that has Pietrzyk deftly juggling several characters in a political family. Really gets DC right. Hollywood has nothing on our nation's capitol in terms of narcissism, shallowness and greed. Leslie Pietrzyk is one helluva writer.

[Lily · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really thought I was gonna like this book so much more than I did. The first few narratives were entertaining, I liked the characters, and was getting into the story. But almost somewhat abruptly, I lost all understanding of how the different perspectives related to each other, and even to the Speaker of the House. I kept waiting for the main plot point about the Speaker's attack to be expanded on, to finally feel like what I was reading and the book's blurb were matching up—but it never came. I think one might enjoy this collection more if you go in without the expectation of a cohesive novel, but several stories very loosely related based on theme. The stories themselves were hit or miss. Some of them I found to be very immersive, I felt enveloped by the characters and their narration. But—and this connects to my earlier point about hoping for a more cohesive overall novel—I sometimes found it hard to understand what certain stories were supposed to be saying, they seemed detail-ridden and aimless. But all in all, the writing in this novel is engaging and far from subpar. I think that my personal opinion of the novel came from misplaced expectations. However, looking at this as a collection of stories somehow grounded in politicics/current events, one might get a lot more out of this read.

[Paulina · Rating 3 out of 5]

My impression is that this is a book of short stories in which some are related and some are not. The ones that are related center around a major political figure (the Speaker - of the House, presumably) and his orbit of staff (interns, chief of staff?) and family. I think I found the perspectives of two of his daughters most interesting, as I too have an estranged relationship with my father. It is indeed surprising that we may want the love of a man who in the grand scheme gave us so little.

The other stories appear to be at least in part connected by the theme of racism as experienced by white, middle class, middle age people, mostly women. As a white middle aged woman I did feel like it portrayed the awkwardness of it all rather well, though I don't know if I ended up learning anything from it. Perhaps I didn't get it, which maybe also is the point.

Maybe because the book hit close to home in a lot of ways, I found it just vaguely disturbing and not as enthralling or entertaining as I'd hoped.

[V · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really wanted to like this a lot more than I did, but by the end, I found myself hoping it would be done soon. Perhaps it's just not a writing style that I'm personally appreciative of. The stories contained within this collection are extremely relevant and timely, as well as deeply uncomfortable and confrontational (This Isn't Who We Are should be required reading for all self-labelled white allies), but some of them drag on entirely too long and become hard to slog through. However, my opinion seems unpopular, so I may have to give this one a reread after some time away.

[Kimberly H · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5 stars rounded up. This won’t be everyone’s jam but I liked the boldness of this collection of somewhat-linked short stories about the collateral damage of one man in power. Well-developed characters (impressive given the brevity) and it was all the more fascinating having been in many of the depicted DC spots. I now won’t ever be able to cross the Woodrow Wilson bridge without thinking of this book.

[Ellen M. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bought this on a whim from the Busboys and Poets in Columbia Heights last spring. It then proceeded to punch me directly in the face (a good thing). I think reading it while living in DC made everything hyper impactful. Every time I rode the yellow line, or went to the Kennedy Center I thought of this book. It’s like going to coffee with a friend, and they casually throw out every single inside thought you’ve ever had, that you’re not sure you’re proud of.