I Meant It Once
Anastasia Krupnik grew up and now she’s about 10 different characters experiencing a quarter-life crisis in I Meant it Once, the debut short story collection from Kate Doyle. I mean, not really (that would be fun, though!), but Doyle’s prose and the dialogue she gives her characters project the same sort of determination-tempered-with-a-large-dash-of-doubt that seems to always encumber our beloved Anastasia.
Admittedly, as I started reading, my initial response was “oh boy, I’m old.” Yet for every reference to a woman “going through something” (the vague phraseology that — intentionally, I would assume — resurfaces in some iteration several times), a gauzy sense of remembering how an era and its possibility-coupled-with-uncertainly “felt like” bubbled up. It is incredibly hard to capture a non-basic, multi-layered emotion (an entire “scene,” if you will); Doyle does this so, so well.
While there is obvious overlap between some characters and stories — such as the sibling trio that appears in more than one story — there are other subtle ways that, I think, Doyle is both serving up an amalgam of young women while also displaying the universality of all this wondering, striving, pondering. Repeated and interwoven details — friends/roommates moving to Austin, young women studying French, mothers who urge “careful,” snow collecting outside a window, and misremembering/forgetting — allow readers an “it could be anyone” response. (That said, the settings might feel *especially close* for someone who spent a large chunk of these formative years in the Northeast US 🙋🏻♀️)
Special shout out to the last story, “Briefly,” for the Dublin setting and the role of synesthesia (and wondering if that’s the same as other concrete “remembering”), the latter of which I posted about back in August. I am so fascinated by this stuff, and it felt serendipitous to read about a character who is too — written, of course, by an author I would presume shares the fascination as well.
originally published on instagram