The Bed Moved: Stories
“Rebecca Schiff’s prose is by turns poignant and wickedly pointed, and terribly funny.”
Life as a young person in America is an urban jungle, whether you live in the city or not, or so posits Rebecca Schiff in her debut book The Bed Moved: Stories. Through a series of stories, some so short as to be micro stories, Schiff takes on the challenges of young adulthood, from finding a job after college to the shifting sand that lies beneath parent/child relationships when the child is no longer a child. Her stories are by turns ribald and mournful and often wryly funny.
In reading the author information, it is to Schiff’s credit that her actual age (mid-40s) is surprising, because she so wonderfully captures the spirit of a twenty-something in these stories.
The book opens with a sexual encounter (the eponymous “The Bed Moved”), and though this is perhaps the weakest of the stories in the collection, it sets the tone for the rest of the book. It would be easy to dismiss Schiff’s characters (though they truly seem to be a single character, in multiple iterations) as shallow, based upon that focus; a deeper look, however, reveals characters that are struggling into adulthood by fits and starts and often using sexual experimentation as the doorway to independence. In this, and in their concern with appearance over substance, they are the mirror of many actual young adults.
Schiff is playful in her use of language; it is by turns poetic (the micro story “Keep an Eye on It” is an excellent example) and crudely funny (the amateur pornographers of “Tips” come immediately to mind). Each story encapsulates an instant in a young person’s life and road to maturity, even if those “young people” who are clinging to their juvenile behaviors aren’t so young at all in “Tips” and “Communication Arts.”
Schiff’s millennial protagonists are mired in expectation, overwhelmed by choices, and they manifest that existential searching through sex like in “It Doesn’t Have to Be a Big Deal”: “Like a hooker, eye contact and hand-holding had become a bigger deal to me than sex itself. Except I wasn’t paid not to have feelings. I had broken my own spirit for free.”
“Rate Me” is a viciously funny look at current online culture, where desire for acceptance meets the often-cruel anonymity of the Internet age then takes it to a ridiculous extreme to make a point. Through story after story, women face hard decisions, death, pain, and make dumb choices that would shock Dr. Laura; more importantly, they keep going and learning and striving.
The Bed Moved: Stories is a book of real people in flux. Rebecca Schiff’s prose is by turns poignant and wickedly pointed, and terribly funny. Her characters bumble through life, sleeping with the wrong people, saying the wrong things, and making terrible choices, but in them readers might recognize their own tumultuous twenties (and maybe some desperate, grabbing-with-fingernails-to-hang-on-to-youth thirties). Well worth a read!