Clothed, Female Figure opens a singular investigation on women: mothers, daughters, gardeners, housecleaners, employers, friends, aunts, nannies. These eleven stories illuminate inner lives in the throes of coming-of-age, self-preservation, passing, motherhood, memory, and redemption. There are dispatches from haloed single-girl apartments in New York; from the house behind the linden tree where the first baby was born; from the horsetail scrubland behind the beach club; an overgrown back garden that becomes the shrouded stage for a reunion. A Russian nanny guards a secret. A new wife subverts housekeeping to keep up with her feminist mother-in-law. An alcoholic daughter is haunted by her mother's disappearance. Through the collection's independent but thematically interlinked narratives, Allio investigates women with sharp and soft edges, and their quest to both embrace and outstrip their domestic dimensions. |