В сборнике Риты Рейнольдс «Так мы говорим» любовь не гарантирует защиты близких

On a beach in Maine, a mother at odds with her sons contemplates the consequences of her desire. Elsewhere, a daughter trains for a half marathon to feel closer to her father. An aunt cares for her abandoned nephew. And a father who is unable to visit his daughter after she is disabled in a shooting visits his stepbrother instead. In Rebecca Reynolds’ “This is How We Speak,” children, parents and friends try their best to care for each other and bump up against their own fears. In 13 stories, Reynolds confronts one of the most painful truths of caretaking — that love does not guarantee protection. And yet, whatever devastation appears in the book is bearable because of its honesty. Reynolds’ characters feel their way through love and hope, reaching towards something akin to acceptance. Reynolds sat down with the Portland Press Herald to talk about the relationships at the core of her collection. I’d love to learn about how the book came to be. What was your process of putting it together? Did you always know you were writing a short story collection? I wrote these stories over many years. Some of them even when I was getting my MFA at Emerson 20 years ago. For a long time, I just wrote stories, and I would send them out. My kids were young, I was very busy and all I could do was write a story now and then. It was around COVID that I started thinking, “What am I doing?” I decided to put them in a collection then. Were there any themes that emerged or surprised you as you started thinking of these stories in conversation with one another? A lot of the stories are about kids and caretaking, because that’s been my experience for so long. And there are a lot of themes about communication. I think some of that comes from having kids because for a while your children can’t communicate at all. They’re babies, and you’re still trying to find these relationships with them. There’s a story — the title story of the collection, “This is How We Speak” — that came from a time in my life when I was working at a group home with individuals who could not communicate with language very well. I came to really know them, but again, we communicated in a different way. I’ve learned humans are very good at finding that different way to connect and communicate. That’s something that interested me in these stories that I didn’t realize until later on. I would love to talk more about the parental relationships that are at the core of the collection. What about these relationships were you interested in exploring? I really wanted to explore how love is mixed with duty and obligation. As a parent, you love your children, but they are a sacrifice, also. There’s always that duality there, or nuance. I wanted to explore that even in the stories where the relationships are not parents and children — maybe they’re friends — but there’s still this sense that we love each other, but we also have a responsibility to each other. Love demands work and sacrifice and duty. It’s not just “pure love.” It’s not just joy. It’s also more. Alongside that responsibility, there seemed to be a recurring desire for escape in the stories. The collection is framed by this question, ‘What do we owe each other?’ But the flip side of that question is, ‘What do we owe ourselves?’ As a writer, how did you honor your characters’ conflicting desires? I’m thinking particularly of the opening story, ‘Everyone Is Smiling.’ The opening story really illustrates that feeling of loving your children so much, but still wanting your own life and your own goals, to have that autonomy that you give up when you have children. For that character in particular, she just couldn’t stop wanting more. Even though it was harmful to her life, she couldn’t contain it. Many of the characters in the collection deal with mental illness or different kinds of disabilities. How were you thinking about disability while writing? A lot of that came from my experience working with disabled people — loving them so much and wanting to put them in stories. I tried to show disability in a way that felt real to me and respectful of the characters as individuals who are very important to me, while still not romanticizing anything. There are a few stories where mental illness is front and center. One is “The Principal” where Shell is following her boyfriend and she has the past trauma of her father committing suicide. There’s another story, “Remember How I Loved You,” where the mom visits her daughter in a psychiatric hospital and they just talk and the mom goes home. We get so much access to the internal conflict of each of these characters. It felt like you were thinking a lot about the limits of what each character could give, but also how the limits of what they were willing to give were causing hurt. Yeah. For example, in “Distance,” the father and daughter love each other. It isn’t an empty relationship, but the daughter wants things from the father that he just isn’t capable of. He is limited, but she is too. And in the end, she comes to accept that she won’t really have that, but he’s still her father. I think that’s true for every relationship. We may want things from people that they can’t give us. You had this line I wrote down. The mother says it in ‘Principle’ — ‘you can’t fix people just by loving them.’ It almost felt like an answer to some of the questions the stories were asking. Oh, I think it is. That’s something I’ve had to learn in many different ways over the years. When I was younger, I really believed that if you just loved someone enough, everything would be OK. And it’s not. That’s not how it works. And when someone is suffering, you know you can’t fix that with just love. You need love, but that’s not the only answer, unfortunately. And I think that’s hard to accept. Sometimes you just have to be present with people and go through it with them, and not fix them, and stay the course, and come out the other end. Summer Wrobel is a writer living in Brooklyn, N.Y.