Small Change

by Elizabeth Hay

A collection of linked stories that navigate the difficult realm of friendship, charting its beginnings and endings, its intimacies and betrayals, its joys and humiliations.

These twenty superbly crafted linked stories navigate the difficult realm of friendship, charting its beginnings and ends, its intimacies and betrayals, its joys and humiliations. A mother learns something of the nature of love from watching her young daughter as she falls in and out of favour with a neighbourhood girl. An intricate story of two women reveals a friendship held together by the steely bonds of passivity. A chance sighting in a library prompts a woman to recall the “unconsummated courtship” she was drawn into by a male colleague. With trenchant insight, uncommon honesty, and dark humour, Elizabeth Hay probes the precarious bonds that exist between friends. The result is an emotionally raw and provocative collection of stories that will resonate with readers long after the final page.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Canada, Literary Fiction, Friendship, Canadian Literature

244 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1997

About the author

From Elizabeth Hay's web site:
"Elizabeth Hay was born in Owen Sound, Ontario, the daughter of a high school principal and a painter, and one of four children. When she was fifteen, a year in England opened up her world and set her on the path to becoming a writer. She attended the University of Toronto, then moved out west, and in 1974 went north to Yellowknife in the Northwest Territories. For the next ten years she worked as a CBC radio broadcaster in Yellowknife, Winnipeg, and Toronto, and eventually freelanced from Mexico. In 1986 she moved from Mexico to New York City, and in 1992, with her husband and two children, she returned to Canada, settling in Ottawa, where she has lived ever since.

In 2007 Elizabeth Hay's third novel, Late Nights on Air, won the Scotiabank Giller Prize. Her first novel was A Student of Weather (2000), a finalist for the Giller Prize, the Ottawa Book Award, and the Pearson Canada Reader's Choice Award at The Word on the Street, and winner of the CAA MOSAID Technologies Inc. Award for Fiction and the TORGI Award. Her second novel, Garbo Laughs (2003), won the Ottawa Book Award and was shortlisted for the Governor General's Award. Hay is also the author of Crossing the Snow Line (stories, 1989); The Only Snow in Havana (non-fiction, 1992), which was a co-winner of the Edna Staebler Award for Creative Non-fiction; Captivity Tales: Canadians in New York (non-fiction, 1993), and Small Change (stories, 1997), which was a finalist for the Governor General’s Award, the Trillium Book Award, and the Rogers Communications Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. Hay received the Marian Engel Award for her body of work in 2002."

Reviews

[Nancy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Posted at Shelf Inflicted

I was at the McGill University Bookstore looking for something by a Canadian writer I hadn’t heard of. On the sale table, I came across this collection of stories by Elizabeth Hay, finalist for the Governor General’s Award, the Trillium Award, and the Rogers Communications Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. Impressive.

Bethie is the narrator of the story. Was Bethie a fictional character or was the author revealing certain aspects of her life and personality through the main character? Maybe a little of both. At times Bethie seemed too real, too honest. I often felt like I was intruding on her private thoughts.

“And here was I, where I had wanted to be for as long as I had been away from it – home – and it didn’t register either. In other words, I discovered that I wasn’t in a place. I was the place. I felt populated by old friends. They lived in my head amid my various broodings. Here they met again, going through the same motions and different ones. Here they coupled in ways that hadn’t occurred really. And here was I, disloyal but faithful, occupied by people I didn’t want to see and didn’t want to lose.”

These loosely linked stories delve into women’s friendships – the difficulties, the joys, and how love, loss, marriage and children can change friendships over time. Reading these stories forced me to examine my own life and contemplate why I have difficulty maintaining close friendships. Maybe it started when I was a child, much too introverted and different to fit in. Or when I was a teenager, forced to leave my two closest friends behind when my parents wanted to leave the big bad city. These stories made me glad I keep people at a distance and manage to avoid the problems that can happen between friends. They also make me feel that I’m missing a vital part of life.

[Magdelanye · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interwoven through the short accounts in this book about the nature of friendship, is the authors portrait of herself. Her style is deceptively straight forward, for she slithers around, offering concrete details disconnected from any permanent niche in an overall plot.She zooms in and out of time zones, collapsing years, stretching an instant into a panorama,looping through her life and zeroing in on the same characters and incidents that she returns to obbsessively. The people who befriended her,who fascinated and then repelled her. Those who dumped her, and those she dumped. A veritable catalogue of grievances and small,sharp hurts.Hays penetrating gaze is selective but not excluding herself and she is fierce in her laments. Also,she does seem to love mintute descriptions of snippets:of books and movies and life itself, pivitol moments that she pounces on and worries over like a bone.

This can be quite irritating to the haplass reader who is trying to configure some kind of order and sense out of the cascade of penetrating details and insights that Hay writes about with a clinical verging on brutal passion. She is quite ruthless in her assessments. "These dramatists. How they set us up." she observes dryly. "A few tears came to my eyes, for what they're worth. Some sympathy, for what it's worth. But in general I felt calm...not exactly out of danger,but uninvolved and unalarmed."

Who could care about such a detached person? Hay is a disparaging of herself as she is of her friends, and I found myself agreeing with her as she formulated the key questions. What makes a friendship and what are the deal breakers? What does it take to be " a good and lasting friend"?
Hay questions the nature of authenticity, shocked by each instance of hypocrisy and disloyalty, mercilessly documenting her own.

By the end end of the book I had to admit that what I disliked about EH were the things I deplore in myself, when I am not under their influence. Anger,obbsession, stifled resentment, steadfast ignorance of unpalatable truths that if acknowleged would be explosive, carelessness, and that ingrained expectation and even tolerance of a certain level of abuse, a fondness for ambiguity.

"Maybe this is the truth: things don't get old and disappear, they remain in hiding and reappear." Hay concludes before admitting after all to being " an emotional bag lady gragging along old friendships, old failings...and using them to keep myself warm in a shabby sort of way."

I was not comfortable in Hay's convoluted overly self-conscious world, but I recognize it's terrain and salute her brilliance in the organization and presentation of the material, so exasperating as to read, but in hindesight bestowing both a vivid immediacy and underlying structure. Maybe I will be able to be a better friend on account of reading this book.

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

Somewhere between a novel and a short short collection. It's one of her earlier works, which perhaps accounts for its formlessness. (She was still yet to write a full novel.) I didn't mind that, however. Her prose is so graceful, so quietly intimate. This felt so much like a diary, I'm not entirely certain it isn't one!

Lovely.

Love her.

[Laila · Rating 3 out of 5]

2.5 stars. A couple of standout stories but most of them just ran together for me. Linked by the same narrator, a thoroughly unsympathetic woman. I kept thinking,”Surely she can have ONE normal, easy friendship!” ( I bought my copy while traveling in Toronto in 2017 at an Indigo near my cousin’s apartment. )

[Paula Dembeck · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have read several novels by this author, a Canadian award-winning writer whose work I admire. I picked up this book published in 1997, believing it to be a compilation of short stories about women’s friendships, but as my reading progressed it felt more like a novel, one with possibly autobiographical underpinnings.

Beth is a writer and the narrator, now forty and looking back on her life and the friendships that were part of it. She describes friendships with both men and women, although the focus remains on her relationships with women. Over the years, she has observed that most men have few friends and that their friendships tend to be less emotionally fraught than those between women. Men don’t think about friendships, spend time analyzing them, rethinking their actions, brooding about what happened, what they could have done better or why they have suddenly developed ill will for someone they once cared about. On the other hand, Beth and her friends spend a lot of time thinking and rethinking those things, mining them for unsaid messages, implied criticisms and developing feelings for everything that has passed between them.

Beth begins and ends these series of stories with Maureen, the relationship that appears to be the most important to her. In between those bookend stories, we see Beth at different times in her life as she moved from New York to Ottawa and back to Toronto, always moving toward a relationship or running away from one. She examines the relationships that were important to her in these different places and during different phases of her life. Some were maintained over long distances by phone calls or letters or if the friend was in the same city, in brief chats in coffee shops. Apart from Maureen there are stories that include Norma, Jill, Carol, Susan, Sophie and Leah and a few men, gay and bi-sexual characters David, Danny and Leonard. The appearances of most of these different people in the narrative are short lived and readers are less invested in them as they never get to know them well. In between describing these friendships, Beth questions the nature of friendship between women, about how our expectations of loyalty are often misplaced and cannot be sustained and reexamines how she has behaved.

Hay’s narrative is intensely personal, honest and self-critical, creating a rather somber tone to the entire work. She explores friendships as fragile things with precarious bonds, always asking herself what she expects from them and examining her own failure as a friend. Her friendships have played an important part in her life and make her take a deep look at herself, at the emotions triggered within her when friendships fail, the petty anger, confusion and hurt when things don’t work out. Through the different characters in her stories, she describes friendship in all its phases from those in which intimacies were shared to those containing the seeds of betrayal. There were times that were happy and filled with joy and others which were disturbing and humiliating.

She tries to understand what happens when one person wants friendship and the other doesn’t; the confusion that occurs when a friend enjoys another’s company but doesn’t want further contact; how a friendship that appeared incredibly close suddenly fades away and what happened between a time of pure happiness in someone’s company that suddenly morphed into a willful eagerness to find fault with them. Beth considers how she likes to pick fights but is too inarticulate to win them and too touchy to remain unscathed. By day she reviews her friendships with all their failings and pitfalls and by night she dreams of reconciliation, conversation and the gentlest affection. She thinks about the moments when friends had been honest with each other, about how wounded and hurtful they felt when they were criticized, realizing these moments are never predictable. She comes to see how feelings of genuine friendliness and genuine resentment may exist simultaneously without bleeding into each other, but at a certain point the balance tips and resentment washes over the friendliness.

She thinks about what happens when a friendship ends, trying to decide if her sadness is over the loss of the friendship, her inability to be a friend or her inability to end the friendship in a kinder way.

Hay’s insight allows her to pick up on and describe every detail and small nuance of behavior from what is spoken to those small silent gestures other might not even notice, all helping her describe the vulnerable nature of friendship.

This is not an easy read and Hay’s way of presenting her characters and her views seems disconnected at times. Some characters appear in more than one vignette at different points in time and it is not always easy to remember when and in what city her character Beth first interacted with them and the key events in their friendship. But Hay’s book is well written and her narrative is not only thoughtful but thought provoking.

[Jennifer Karch Verzè]

Elizabeth Hay probes the precarious bonds that exist between friends. The result is an emotionally raw and provocative collection of stories that will resonate with me long after the final page. All these friendships between girls, women, men and women. It makes you think of how friendships come and go, wave and retreat, remain in your heart and hurt you so you dream of them at night. Sometimes you are confused in the book, other times your are in a moment of revelation. Written well, obtuse somewhat, not straightforward and enticing. Good Canadian author!! She was written up in the Italian papers and I bought her book from Amazon because of that. Not because I read of her in some Canadian magazine...

[Angie Abdou · Rating 5 out of 5]

This short story collection was my introduction to Elizabeth Hay. I knew right away she was going to be huge. I love being right. Small Change is honest, daring, and original. Its focus is the dark side of women's friendships.

[Debbie · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book with related short stories about friendship really touched me. Elizabeth Hay is one of my favourite authors and this early book of hers just hit all the right notes. It was like she read my soul. Fantastic!

[Laura · Rating 4 out of 5]

I loved how the stories were interwoven and how it beautifully reflected the complexities of friendships.

[Salty Swift · Rating 4 out of 5]

Moving, though a very uneven collection of stories. Parenting, love, affairs, friendships are interlinked. The most relatable story is one that tells of a mother whose young daughter is constantly unfriended by her finicky schoolmate. Her mom tries to help and make peace but every attempt is futile. Beautifully captured moments.

[Erika Nerdypants · Rating 4 out of 5]

There is so much to love in this powerful collection of short stories. The central character in these linked stories is Beth, who narrates the history of her friendships, mostly with women, but one or two involve men with whom she has had complicated relationships. In tender prose she excavates the big and little traumas on which friendships falter and fail. Beth is all too human, at times too thin-skinned to be able to absorb the natural disappointments that occur in all our relationships, but I loved how real she became to me, how I could so completely relate to her experiences. In her examinations she asks questions about the nature of friendship between women, about how our expectations of loyalty are often misplaced and in the end cannot be sustained. The stories are powerful and important because rather than sentimentalizing friendships between women, they expose the darker undercurrents of competitiveness, jealousies and acts of aggression which women have been socialized to suppress. Beth may not be sympathetic or likeable, but she is unflinchingly honest in her self-examinations, and in the end I have more in common with her than I want to admit. For me, this collection would have worked better as a complete novel, I found the narration at times disconnected and it was difficult to remember which friend I had met where, but overall a thoughtful and thought provoking read.

[Michelle · Rating 3 out of 5]

"The pattern leads here, to a woman past forty counting up her friendships and arriving at small change."

Such a huge fan of Hay's writing, so disappointed in the grimness of these short stories about friendships--the kernels of which were drawn from her journals and notebooks (according to the back story on Hay's website). Every tale is about the building up and undoing of a friendship, with the protagonist Bethie usually being the one to back off, step away, break up. The stories are interwoven, with a few key characters threading their way through several chapters. The timeline is fluid, going backwards and forwards between cities. The writing is superb, as always. Not enough, sadly, to move my rating up to four stars because she didn't give me a single character to love, or even like. However, this book does not undo the five stars given every other book of hers that I have read. Looking forward to many more books from Elizabeth Hay.

[Karen Mcilhargey · Rating 1 out of 5]

I found this book very hard to read. I read "Late Nights on Air" a few years back and loved it. I wanted to read something else by Elizabeth Hay so picked up "Small Change." There were certain moments that I enjoyed about his book, but for the most part I had a hard time believing that "Small Change" was written by the same author as "Late Nights on Air." "Small Change" is composed of 20 short stories about friendship that were linked together by the narrator, Bethie, a woman that has had many ups and downs in her different friendships. I personally found the individual stories to be quite disconnected from each other and sporadic. For me, Hay's writing style became something to endure rather than enjoy in "Small Change."

[Louise Gleeson · Rating 3 out of 5]

A collection of interwoven short stories about female friendships. I really like short story collections (HUGE Alice Munro fan here), but I didn't fall in love with this collection. Maybe I had a hard time relating, because I don't have toxic female relationships to compare these stories to -- and that's a very good thing. I'm starting in on her newest novel, His Whole Life, next.

[Linda Munroe · Rating 4 out of 5]

I chose to read this book in reaction to my having just read Sparrow Nights by David Gilmore. I am delighted with the very intimate and complex focus on friendship these connected stories explore.
Hay describes the richness of joy and interest that friendships bring to our lives. This exploration focuses intently on the difficulties involved in maintaining and navigating friendships over time. Friendships are subject to power inbalances, bullying, boredom, differences in values, religious fundamentalism, illness, interference from husbands and geography. All seemingly small things that can change the nature of the relationship. The deep rewards of sharing experience can change. The sharing becomes a chore. The common understandings and connections are no longer certain.
The protagonist, Bethie isn't really much kinder or nicer than any of us. She questions her friends decisions, she is judgmental of their choices but she does not address concerns with her friends. She ignores them while they occupy her mind creating discord or dissonance. She seems to be experiencing, observing and recording what happens without planning, deciding or doing.
The writer creates an aura or atmosphere that seems a little foggy. We only know what Bethie tells us and she doesn't tell us everything in the correct order. Her inner dialogue jumps around in time and location. We are in the past and the present. We are reading about fluid experiences and discrete events. We are in Toronto and New York and other places. We are reading about Bethie as a young adult and as a young Mother and as an older adult. We are reading about several different friends and at different times in the course of the friendship. It makes for a challenging and interesting read.

[Avie]

Reading this felt like a chore. The issues at hand were relatable, but it was difficult to sympathize with the protagonist. Out of the friends sketched out in the short chapters, the ones she does not seem to resent were those who die, or physically/temporally distant.
At times, the musings seemed overly self-indulgent. Relationships are flawed, perhaps what is "wrong" is the exalted ideal. But the problem with the protagonist is more than her obsession. Kept thinking toward the end if she(/the author if it's autobiographical) is the Zola of the stories. I suppose the book has its qualities for me to even bother writing a review about it. All in all, though, I won't dwell in its realms, and release this one back into the biblio wilderness out there.

[Femke · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book took me a while to read, as it is a collection of short stories. I usually just read 1 or 2 stories and then put it down again for a few days. The stories are linked together, both by the characters, as well as by the topic of friendships and relationships.

I think it was an ok collection. Some stories were nice to read, but overall nothing that really stood out.

[Ellen F · Rating 3 out of 5]

Skillfully executed stories, with a running theme: "[H]ow easy to enter a friendship deeply and on someone else's terms, and how difficult to get out except crudely and with a lasting residue." The narrator doesn't seem to grow over the course of the book - that is, self-awareness does not seem to lead to better outcomes. Dog preserve me from friends like this!

[Elisabeth · Rating 3 out of 5]

A collection of short stories, linked through a common set of characters.
I’m never sure with Elizabeth Hay’s writing — which is gorgeous — how much is memoir and how much is fiction. I guess it doesn’t really matter.

[heidi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mid-life contemplations on friendships, loss, and love. Read over 6 months because these short stories required some digestion... pretty relatable, self-indulgent, journally reflections that both irritated and touched me deeply. Resentfully adored and might read again someday.

[Deb Mohr · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was sold to me as a book of short stories. To be honest, it was hard to determine where one story ends and another begins. A bit confusing at times, but I enjoyed the writing and have already added more of her books to my reading shelf. #1438

[Mikaela · Rating 3 out of 5]

Picked this up somewhere on a whim and enjoyed it. Well-done personal narrative/memoir in the form of short stories about friendship(s).

[kp · Rating 4 out of 5]

Eloquent set of linked short stories--a novel in its way--musing on the betrayals and kindnesses of friendship.

[Sharon Levy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Well written collection of interwoven short stories with therapeutic insights into the nature of female friendships.

[Joanne · Rating 4 out of 5]

What it is to be an introvert and to crave friendship while at the same finding intimacy a challenge. A sad book of loneliness, honest and courageous. Mental bleeding I could feel on every page.

[Barbara Schmich · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a book of short stories connected by fire. I found it very dark.

[Kathy Tatrallyay · Rating 2 out of 5]

DNF

[David · Rating 2 out of 5]

A book I started to read seven or eight times before it became clear to me I was never going to commit to it.

[Jenny Yates · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is collection of linked short stories, and the theme is friendship. Each chapter deals with a different relationship, a friendship that has somehow gone awry. This happens in subtle ways, detailed through the thoughts and encounters that pass between Beth (the narrator) and her friends. The cycle of friendship is contrasted with the cycle of romantic love, and sometimes it echoes it, particularly in the high hopes that go with a new friendship and the later need for space.

The writing is poetic and painstakingly honest, as the narrator investigates all her own small cruelties, her lack of faith, her recurring dishonesty with the people who come and go in her life. Her husband and daughter are drawn as easygoing characters, less critical and more charitable than Beth, but they also have to find ways to deal with the inequities of friendship.

[Charlene Dobmeier · Rating 4 out of 5]

Small Change by Elizabeth Hay.

Such beautiful and economic writing. Few writers can say so much with so few words. All the nuances of friendship and how we waste so much of our time on friendships that really matter little, or not at all, to us.
"And here I was, disloyal but faithful, occupied by people I didn't want to see and didn't want to lose." The ebb and flow of friendship. I am not interested in the ebb, but I used to be, as are many of her characters.