If I had to select two words to describe Lauren D. Woods’s short story collection The Great Grown-Up Game of Make-Believe (winner of the 2024 Autumn House Fiction Prize), they would be “playful” and “gutting.”
Let’s start with “playful.” The Great Grown-Up Game of Make-Believe is packed with inventive, charming, and daring premises. There’s a story about a wife who transforms into a swan to please her fickle husband. There’s a story about 4th graders who put their peers on performance improvement plans. There’s a story framed as a questionnaire about whether or not your next-door neighbor is a witch.
On to “gutting.” What grounds these inventive stories is (for lack of a better phrase) the mind-numbing grind of domesticity. Teenage fathers wonder: “What is it about having kids that turns you into a person who doesn’t care about having someone’s spit in your hand?” Infants are “fresh and new, like a warm thing pulled from the dirt.” Mothers enter “mommy brain” flow states, somewhere between enlightenment and animal consciousness, alarmingly capable of “operating perfectly without a mind.”
For me, the key to Woods’s collection—what makes it so harrowing and compelling—is the way the characters in these stories are painfully aware of how close they are to being characters in other stories. Narratives are threatened by an undertow of counterfactuals. Present timelines are haunted by aborted futures. Lives teeter on the verge of becoming afterlives.
In one of the standout stories in the collection, “Bear Sightings,” the narrator remarks: “How close Chloe had come to another life. And how easily it had all begun, the move toward it. The drive, the coffee. Another life was just a short distance beyond a gas station with hot pots of coffee, or maybe, a hand on the leg, a squeeze of fingers in return, the unraveling of the old life, weaving into something new.” Chloe, like many of the protagonists in The Great Grown-Up Game of Make-Believe, is one exit away from a new version of herself. As the etymology of the word suggests, a “version” is simply a turn, a bend that can be leaned into or veered away from. Part of the charm of Woods’s characters is how they’re simultaneously tormented and nourished by the forks they didn’t take.
In a story titled “The Inner Chamber,” the protagonist is stuck in a bar that doubles as her lover’s heart. As she lounges among her lover’s many exes, she barely recognizes herself. She laments: “I exist here only as a specific version of myself—his version.”
In a story titled “Evening by the Lake,” a daughter stumbles on a forgotten possibility, a family life that might have existed if her mother’s boyfriend hadn’t died unexpectedly, prompting her biological father to get his act together and eventually re-woo his estranged wife. The daughter and mother are bound by this hypothetical—a life full of youth and whimsy, a life with a father figure who likes Nintendo and Taco Bell—but it’s the kind of life that only exists in whispers and secrets. As the protagonist of “Evening by the Lake” puts it: “I feel the secret that binds Mom and me and surrounds us, making the two of us feel alone, and not so alone, seeming one way and then another, like the tiny strings of lights I see in the distance blinking on and off again—light followed by darkness followed by light.”
There’s a fairy tale logic to the stories in The Great Grown-Up Game of Make-Believe. Every loss is balanced by something found. What goes up must come down. In another standout story in the collection, “Proportions,” the shrinking protagonist Serene discovers she’s not the only one shrinking: it turns out that Serene’s mother has been hiding in her daughter’s pockets—a helper of sorts, a guardian angel—and that Serene’s grandmother has likewise been hiding in her mother’s pockets, and so on and so forth (imagine a Russian doll of motherhood). The story reimagines parenting as a zero-sum game in which all love incurs an equal allotment of loss. As we must grow, so our parents must diminish. This dilemma serves as the beating heart of Woods’s collection: how does one give without giving oneself away? Or as the narrator of “Proportions” articulates the point: “It was all about finding the right combination of shrinking, growing, shrinking again, and she wasn’t sure how she could ever get it right.”
The beauty of The Great Grown-Up Game of Make-Believe is that it pulls off the whole shrinking and growing business rather deftly, alternating between flash fiction and more traditional-length stories, drawing readers in with equal parts whimsy, grit, and heart.
