Lori Ostlund might be a San Francisco-based author now, but don’t expect her characters to always inhabit the Golden State.
In Ostlund’s new short story collection Are You Happy?, we instead meet characters from Minnesota and New Mexico, with only the occasional fleeting glance toward San Francisco or New York City. The reason becomes clear as her stories unfurl: Ostlund’s writing is most at home in small schools, small towns and small dive bars, all of them imbued with a permanent sense of enclosure, claustrophobia and unease. Major cities loom on the horizon only as escape hatches.
Other themes weave throughout these nine stories. Grief, for lives lost too soon, or for lives thrown away at the local bar. Being LGBTQ+, usually in places where it isn’t altogether safe. The constant threat of violence that permeates American culture and, in particular, women’s psyches.
Ostlund herself — a teacher of 25 years, and a lesbian — grew up in small-town Minnesota. Because she writes about what she most intimately knows, her stories are consistently immersive.
One of the most impactful stories in Are You Happy? is “The Stalker,” about a female teacher grappling with a sinister, potentially dangerous student. Ostlund juxtaposes the coziness of the teacher’s quiet home life, complete with wife and cat, with the cold, exposed feeling of fending for herself in night classes with a former soldier who may or may not want to hurt her.
