Title: This TellingAuthor: Cheryl Strayed
Series: Out of Line #1
First Published: September 1, 2020
Publisher: Amazon Original Stories
Pages: 37
Genre: Historical Fiction, Short Stories, Women's Fiction
Format: Ebook
Source: Prime Reading
Rating:
A genealogy test sparks a woman’s reflection on the two accounts of her life—the real one and the one she’s always told the world—in this poignant short story by Cheryl Strayed, the bestselling author of Wild.
In 1964 teenage Geraldine Waters was sent away by her parents to an unwed mothers’ home, where she gave up her newborn for adoption. Ever since, she’s lived an alternative narrative. Decades later, it’s time for Geraldine to reconcile the telling of her life, to finally grieve, and to discover what happened to that part of her past that slipped away.
This story took my breath away! This Telling is a bittersweet short about the difficult choices that young expectant mothers face with pregnancy; do you keep the child, abort it, or give it up for adoption? How does this alter her path in life, can she be happy becoming a stay-at-home mother after a gunshot wedding? Geraldine contemplates each of these questions as she finds herself pregnant for the first time at the age of eighteen, freshly graduated from high school with an unreliable boyfriend who has no interest in becoming a father at the cusp of adulthood.
Geraldine realizes very quickly that having a baby is not entirely up to her, especially when she’s so young and hasn’t had an opportunity to establish herself. She asks herself, “What can you provide for this baby?” The realization that she is a prisoner of her own body and is at the mercy of the people around her is a sobering reality, a sad reality for many women.
The story follows Geraldine after she first finds out she’s pregnant and the life choices that take her to old age, where she finds herself faced with the truth of what had happened to her. The characters are well-written and the plot is solid enough that this could have easily been a much longer novel. Unfortunately, there are not enough pages to cover all of the years between that first pregnancy and the present day, and the story ends a bit abruptly which was a shame. I would’ve enjoyed getting to know Geraldine better and spending more time reading about her life story but alas.
“She looked at her parents, clear-eyed and astonished, like she understood exactly who she was for the very first time. A prisoner of her own body.”
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About Cheryl Strayed
Cheryl Strayed is the author of the #1 New York Times bestselling memoir Wild, the New York Times bestsellers Tiny Beautiful Things and Brave Enough, and the novel Torch. Wild was chosen by Oprah Winfrey as her first selection for Oprah’s Book Club 2.0. Strayed’s books have been translated into nearly forty languages around the world and have been adapted for both the screen and the stage.
The Oscar-nominated movie adaptation of Wild stars Reese Witherspoon as Cheryl and Laura Dern as Cheryl’s mother, Bobbi. Tiny Beautiful Things was adapted for the stage by Nia Vardalos, who also starred in the role of Sugar/Cheryl. The play was directed by Thomas Kail and debuted at The Public Theater in New York City.
Strayed is the host of the New York Times hit podcast, Sugar Calling and also Dear Sugars, which she co-hosted with Steve Almond. Her essays have been published in The Best American Essays, the New York Times, the Washington Post Magazine, Vogue, Salon, The Sun, Tin House, The New York Times Book Review, and elsewhere. Strayed holds an MFA in fiction writing from Syracuse University and a bachelor’s degree from the University of Minnesota. She lives in Portland, Oregon.