This book is, among many other things, about grief and loss, and about women unwilling to diminish their desires to live full and complex lives. – Author Danielle Evans
I didn’t know anything about Danielle Evans’s book The Office of Historical Corrections when I bought it, but I loved the title. The book is a series of short stories and one novella. Although I earned my MFA in short fiction, I have discovered I don’t really like to read short story collections that much. Not so in this case. This was a compelling and moving collection.
All of the short stories feature a woman as the main character. In the first story, a woman who lost her mother to ovarian cancer works at a commercial Titanic exhibit. She takes part in a music video filmed at the exhibit. Afterwards, she has desultory sex with a stranger, where we learn the character has decided not to undergo medical tests that might save her life. The woman did not have the power to save her mother, and her grief leads her to passively give up her own life.
The next story features a woman who goes to a wedding where the bride-to-be is threatened by the fact the woman was best friends with the groom. The groom takes off before the ceremony and the bride and the woman go on a brief road trip to find him. Along the way, they form an uneasy connection which ends with them veering off to a water park after the bride realizes she doesn’t want to marry the groom after all.
The main characters of most of the stories are Black women, but the third story is from the point of view of a white woman who turns her back on her past and her close friendship with her Black childhood friend. Taking place during her college years, the main character torments a Black woman in her dorm where the incident hits social media. It seems to be a form of displaced racist revenge against her childhood friend, whose mother survived cancer while her own mother didn’t. There’s a very powerful scene at the end of a college town hall to address the racial incident, where the Black students in attendance silently refuse to take the stage to speak, filing out of the auditorium after handing the dean blank notecards where students were given the option to submit their comments. There is no redemption for the main character and little self understanding.
The two stories that affected me the most were one about a young Black woman who takes care of a toddler who is abandoned by his white, drug-addicted mother on a bus they are all traveling on. As unrealistic as the premise is, it’s a story full of tenderness, about love and loss and a young woman alone trying to form a kind of family.
The other, best story was the novella “The Office of Historical Corrections.” The main character Cassie works for the Institute of Public History, referred to humorously by staff as the Office of Historical Corrections. The Institute sends staff into the field to correct false history on anything posted publicly, such as plaques and signs. Cassie is sent to Wisconsin to verify the truthfulness of a plaque that was altered by an ex-staff member to expose the white people who burned down a Black man’s business with him inside it. There is a rumour that the man didn’t actually die, but escaped. Even though the plaque was correct in those it accused of the crime, the fact of the man’s death has to be investigated. The ex-staff member, Genevieve, is in the same town following up on the story and a supremacist group called White Justice. Cassie and Genevieve, who is also Black, have a complicated past as young friends and later colleagues. The story explores truth, loss, racial identity, and both the different and similar ways the women experience life as Black women. It is a superb story.
I probably won’t read many more short story collections outside of mystery stories, but I’m very glad I read this one.