Darling?

“Love is… I am… absurd,” declares the narrator of the first story in this smart and fearlessly insightful collection, cataloguing her own disastrous romances in an attempt to dissuade her sister from making a foolish marriage. She does not succeed: like most of the characters in Darling? she is doomed to struggle with love, both romantic and filial. Their triumphs are small and hard won, their failures often painfully funny: A psychotherapy patient, violently in love with her mild-mannered shrinking violet of a shrink, finds she has driven him nearly crazy, but that by means of her ridiculous passion she’s been cured. A gaggle of would-be writers are so bedazzled by fame, fortune, and the “marketing strategies” that would gain these ends that they never put pen to paper. A young man gives in to despair and commits suicide, but life sweeps his devastated family forward into its rushing stream again, almost against their will.Heidi Jon Schmidt sees everything fresh; her wit cuts straight to the hearts of her characters and finds those hearts fully—beautifully—alive. Darling> marks the return of a powerfully original writer.