The Dead Husband Project
- Publisher
- Doubleday Canada
- Initial publish date
- Aug 2017
- Category
- Contemporary Women, Literary, Short Stories (single author)
-
Paperback / softback
- ISBN
- 9780385687607
- Publish Date
- Aug 2017
- List Price
- $22.00
-
CD-Audio
- ISBN
- 9781978642607
- Publish Date
- Jul 2018
- List Price
- $21.99
Classroom Resources
Where to buy it
Description
Perfect for readers of George Saunders, Jennifer Egan and Heather O'Neill, a rich and inventive collection of exquisite short stories by a major newcomer to Canadian literature.
In this deeply felt, compulsive and edgy work, Sarah Meehan Sirk shines a distinctive light on love and death in their many incarnations, pushing against the limits of the absurd while exposing piercing emotional truths about what it means to be gloriously, maddeningly alive.
In "The Dead Husband Project," an artist who has planned to make an installation out of her terminally ill husband's dead body has to recalibrate when his diagnosis changes. In "The Date," an online dating match takes an unusual turn when the man who shows up to the restaurant has no face. In "Ozk," a young girl longs to connect with her socially isolated mother, a professor of mathematics who makes a radical discovery.
Uncanny, sometimes violent, achingly sad and always profound, these stories showcase a writer with skill and empathy, and draw us in with a steady, unyielding grip.
About the author
SARAH MEEHAN SIRK is a writer, radio producer and broadcaster. Her short fiction has appeared in The New Quarterly, PRISM international, Room, Joyland and Taddle Creek, and is anthologized in The Journey Prize Stories. At the CBC, she co-produced and hosted the 2015 Radio One series Stripped, worked on Q (now q) and DNTO, and was a founding producer of Day 6 with Brent Bambury. Before that, she produced a Toronto crime show, hosted sports programs, filed human rights reports with Ghanaian journalists in West Africa, and co-produced and hosted a short TV series on minor hockey that was nominated for a Gemini Award (it lost to the Olympics). She lives in Toronto with her young family and is working on her first novel.
Excerpt: The Dead Husband Project (by (author) Sarah Meehan Sirk)
The Dead Husband Project
Sweaty, limbs entwined, blankets kicked to the floor.
Paris.
Maureen Davis had married Joe McGovern five days earlier in a gown she’d made herself and pinned with flowers that had wilted before midnight. The ceremony bare in an unadorned gallery, the guests unsure whether it was real or performance art or something else altogether until the wine came out and the mini spanakopitas were passed around and Phil dumped a pile of blow on the altar, and then no one seemed to care one way or another. She’d been buoyant that night, her feet hovering inches off the ground as she bobbed along at her new husband’s side through the riotous guests and the churchy scent of burned-out candles.
Joe rubbed his bare foot against the arch of hers. She shimmied closer over the sheets and pressed her back against him; he wrapped his arm around her waist. They were sticky and hot and smelled of fermented wine and smoky hair and they couldn’t get close enough to each other.
“Everything enmeshed,” he said, kissing the back of her neck. “Eating, working. Fucking, sleeping. Everything together.”
Noise from the narrow cobblestone street below wafted up through the heavy, shifting curtains: male voices barking in rapid French, café chairs scraped along time-worn stones, laughter at the expense of someone. Impossible to tell if it was day or night.
“You say that now.”
“Now. Always.” He reached for a cigarette and lit it. “Forever and ever, amen.”
He sat up and clicked on the radio, the ladder of his vertebrae pressing through his freckled back. Something unknowable beneath the surface. But she knew, knew each bend and curve and divot and mole. She traced her finger down the lowest part of his spine.
He took a long drag. “I’ve been thinking,” he said. “I’ve got this idea. It would be collaborative.”
He passed her the cigarette. His hair was flattened to his skull in parts, sticking up in others. Everything he did made him think. Everything he did made him want to create. Red creases from the sheets crisscrossed between the moles on his shoulder blades. She could feel his excitement, the heat of it. A furnace roaring to life. He was always coming up with new concepts, brilliant concepts. More now, it seemed, and she liked to think that she was his muse.
She took a drag and gave it back to him, rolling onto her stomach. She knew whatever it was would take him
away, for a time. But that was who he was. And he was hers.
“What time do you think it is?” she asked, faking a yawn.
“Eight-thirty. The announcer just said it. Vingt heures et demie.”
“Oh. I wasn’t listening.” She was. Her French sucked. “We should eat something.”
Joe stood, dropped the butt into a glass of water and swivelled his hips so his penis circled around and around. He kissed her before going to the bathroom to pee.
“It’s that ‘until death do us part’ line,” he said over the tinkle of his urine in the toilet bowl. “I’ve been thinking about what that means. Like, imagine if when one of us died, the other one—”
The rest of his sentence got lost in the flush, the blast of water in the sink. He gasped as he splashed his face.
She watched him sashay to the window and throw open the curtains to the Paris night, naked, his body stretched out like a star. Hoots and whistles up from the street, a woman shouting a cascade of incomprehensible words.
“I don’t want to think about you dying,” Maureen said.
He turned his face to her with his arms and legs still splayed, framed by the window. His expression draining of performance, his eyes quieting. He looked back out onto the street and over the rooftops.
“It’s not about that.” His voice almost tender. “It’s about permanence. Love. What endures, what doesn’t. What’s left in the end.”
He yanked the curtains closed and used his teeth to pull the cork out of the bottle of Bordeaux. “Anyway, it’s just the start.” He poured mouthfuls into each of their glasses. “Seeds. Nothing yet in the ground.” He placed the bottle back on his nightstand, lit another cigarette and lay down beside her. “Decades to go before I sleep.”
Miles, she thought. Miles to go.
She watched the smoke rise to the cracked ceiling, her hand searching for his in the wrinkled sheets. Such beauty in a crack, the patternless zigzagging of it, this scar of decay. The possibility that the floor above could give way and fall through, plaster and wood and frayed wires collapsing onto them mid-fuck.
She started to have ideas. Things falling apart often gave her ideas. He rolled on top of her, pressing her body into the soft mattress, blocking her view of the crack.
“Doesn’t inspiration make you horny?” he asked. He took one last drag and dropped his cigarette into her wineglass.
Editorial Reviews
"Fiercely imaginative, original and deeply affecting. These stories explore what is essential about human experience—the implications of living in a body, how the spirit is chained and defined by flesh and bone and how we escape those constraints. Sarah Meehan Sirk is a bold writer and these stories are seeking, searing and oddly beautiful. Like Margaret Atwood and Barbara Gowdy, Sirk reminds us the imagination has no borders." —Lisa Moore
"Sarah Meehan Sirk takes a sharp pen to conceptual art, dating apps, reality TV, mommy bloggers, social media and other contemporary obsessions, often marrying preposterous scenarios with ordinary concerns. . . . These surprising twists, braided with the most everyday of circumstances, make for an inventive, often intense—and highly readable—collection. . . . The writing is sharp, crisp and alive. We are inserted firmly into the action and the emotion of the story, the headspace of the protagonist and the tension surrounding him or her (usually her). . . . These concise portraits of life are often devastating—but always delightful." —The Globe and Mail
"Sarah Meehan Sirk's debut short story collection manages to transcend much of life's inherent darkness to land in a tender, human place that's recognizable to all. With a keen ear, Sirk nails the nuances of dialogue—between husbands and wives, mothers and daughters, friends and lovers—with the real kickers being the internal ones of characters struggling to give the best impression of themselves from inside their personal reality. Bypassing the formulaic and predictable, The Dead Husband Project is a stellar shout out to the power and relevance of the short story." —Toronto Star
"Sirk is a gifted stylist; her sentences are lyrical and clean and pulse with a quiet, fervent energy. The Dead Husband Project charts a world just peculiar enough to mimic the odd bends life can take, and the quiet spaces in the stories point to how the smallest of things—gaps in conversations; things that don't get said but should—can grow and fester. . . . In the hands of this storyteller, love in all its guises can, for a time, feel entirely new." —Quill & Quire
"The summer's most macabre short story collection taps into the latent horrors of modern romance. Its lovelorn heroines find themselves in all sorts of strange scenarios. . . . Sarah Meehan Sirk brings tenderness to the Gothic grotesquerie." —Toronto Life
"Sarah Meehan Sirk [is] adept at misdirection and wry comedy. If this amusing and intriguing book is any indication, she has a very promising future. . . . All of the stories . . . are powerful, intriguing and fresh. They are terse but pleasurably expandable through the fracturing of chronology and misdirection. The Dead Husband Project is a very lively read." —Winnipeg Free Press
"Sarah Meehan Sirk's stories are grandly written, stunningly beautiful, celebratory and profane. They make us laugh, break our heart. We witness a powerful and important debut." —David Adams Richards
"The Dead Husband Project is high-definition in the details of life it captures across its stories. No matter the situation—an art opening, a family vacation, the discovery of a new colour—Sirk pushes through jarring truths to subtle beauty." —Emily Schultz
