The Story I Tell Myself about Myself

Product Description

Sarah Layden’s The Story I Tell Myself About Myself, winner of the inaugural Sonder Press Chapbook Competition, is an intimate, deftly crafted collection. The fictions housed here, while brief, are delicate and deliberate, each capturing at once the vast, fleeting fragility of our existence and the singular, profound experience of each moment lived. And while these are stories of abandonment and regret, of desire, guilt and longing, there is love and good intention, faith and wonder here, as well. Layden crafts her prose with precision and a keen understanding of the nuance of language. Each story is a measured mouthful, sweet and full on the tongue. The Story I Tell Myself About Myself tells the story of all of us, the spectrum of our lives laid bare, our own reflection refracted.

Review

“The fifteen stories in Layden’s new collection–a follow-up to her powerhouse debut novel, Trip Through Your Wires–explore loss, loneliness, and life. The stories run the gamut from magical realism to realism that’s magical, each with Layden’s sharp wit, insightfully drawn characters, and unflinching prose.”
–
James Figy for Split Lip Magazine

“Sarah Layden’s flash fiction collection,
The Story I Tell Myself About Myself, evokes ghosts of SherwoodAnderson’s well-known ‘grotesques’ in
Winesburg, Ohio. Layden’s characters,too, are flawed and broken, grappling with isolation and desperation,attempting to endure their pain. And like Anderson’s, Layden’s characters aredeeply worth the time and effort to understand them.”
-Dheepa R. Maturi for PANK Magazine

”
The Story I Tell Myself About Myself
gives you no choice but this: stay. Stay with these characters and listen to what they have to tell you.”
  -Frannie McMillan for SmokeLong Quarterly

“This style/approach reminds me of one of my favorite authors, AimeeBender, how she just throws her wildly creative and wonderful concepts out inthe first sentence, then goes from there–I’ve tried to copy that for the lasttwenty years or so, to varying degrees of success. Layden is way better at itthan me. That’s why I like this book so much, I think, because it reminds me ofwhat I love about writing, what has always inspired me, what inspires metoday.”
-Michael Czyzniejewski, Story366

About the Author

Sarah Layden is the author of the novel Trip Through Your Wires. Her short fiction has appeared in Boston Review, Artful Dodge, Stone Canoe, Blackbird, and elsewhere, with nonfiction in Salon, Ladies’ Home Journal, The Humanist, and other publications. She teaches writing at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis and the Indiana Writers Center.