“‘Someone Should Know This Story’ is both the name of this book and the wish of my heart,” writes Merrill Joan Gerber in the introduction to this retrospective collection of twenty-five stories written over a period of four decades, many of which won awards and appeared in widely read periodicals such as The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Redbook, and Mademoiselle.
Gerber takes her teacher Andrew Lytle’s advice to “follow the thread back into the labyrinth” of the heart and its secrets. Finding its starting place with the crises of everyday family life—its conflicts, betrayals, confinements, and its devastating losses—she and her characters constantly reencounter themselves and the persistent yearning to “convey to others what we are” with grace and breathtaking honesty.
Notices
“Merrill Joan Gerber’s powerful collection confirms her place among the ranks of America’s best fiction writers.”
—Joyce Carol Oates, author of Fox
“‘A writer must not allow herself to worry about hurting someone’s feelings when art calls for honesty,’ Merrill Joan Gerber writes in the introduction to her selected stories, and it is a principle the author has admirably put into practice throughout her long and lauded career. The stories in Someone Should Know This Story, originally published between 1963 and 2002, do not sugarcoat the truth or the messiness of existence; they explore and expose. Characters young, old, and in between struggle. Families are volatile entities. Spouses disappoint. Parents interfere. Women, perennially, do more than their share. Rage erupts, and death—rarely in kind fashion—arrives. A bracing read to be enjoyed by Gerber fans previous and new.”
—Kat Meads, author of While Visiting Babette
“Merrill Joan Gerber explores the lives of women and families with sly wit, unflinching honesty, and genuine compassion. Written over the course of four decades, these stories serve as both an indelible record and a laying bare of our most intimate and enduring longings.”
—Dawn Raffel, author of Boundless As the Sky
“Each of these marvelous stories powerfully draws in the reader and gives great pleasure, even as they constantly remind us to beware—for real love is fierce, capricious, with dangerously sharp edges.”
—Aryeh Lev Stollman, author of The Far Euphrates
“In story after story, the author demonstrates a deep sensitivity to the ways in which people miscomprehend each other, even when one party is attempting to be honest…. the absence of sensational, dramatic events, such vulnerability, which is so rarely understood or reciprocated, forms the nucleus around which many of these ripped-from-life stories circle. Whether they’re longtime fans or are discovering Gerber for the first time, readers will take much from this collection, which feels like not only the culmination of a long career but of a long life. A book of consistently arresting and engaging stories about family life.”
Merrill Joan Gerber has written thirty books, including The Kingdom of Brooklyn, winner of the Ribalow Award from Hadassah Magazine, and King of the World, winner of the Pushcart Editors’ Book Award. Her fiction has been published in the New Yorker, the Sewanee Review, the Atlantic, Mademoiselle, and Redbook, and her essays in the American Scholar, Salmagundi, and Commentary. She has won an O. Henry Award, a Best American Essays award, and a Wallace Stegner fiction fellowship to Stanford University. She retired in 2020 after teaching writing at the California Institute of Technology for thirty-two years. Her literary archive is now at the Yale Beinecke Rare Book Library.