Origin Stories: Stories

Origin Stories by Corinna Vallianatos is a collection of fictional stories highlighting an array of women characters and the people in their lives, in various moments of their marriages, friendships, motherhood, passion, and careers. Despite each story being inhabited by different people with different circumstances, many of the 15 stories share a similar sense of rather dreary self-involvement.
“New Girls,” the opening story about young women in group therapy, previews the inner monologues and reveals the author’s chosen style of writing.
“Who were we? We were an ex-model who had escaped her abusive father in a rowboat across the choppy waters of the Chesapeake Bay. We were a premed student who had discovered that a cat she was dissecting was pregnant, miniature cats tucked in a row inside the mother, and that what she would have to do from here on out was look upon a whole and think of it as parts, that she would have to salvage it. We were an art history major in possession of an excellent cable-knit cardigan who had gone on a shopping spree at a downtown boutique and bought hundreds and hundreds of dollars’ worth of clothing, indecorous bags of it. Dressing rooms, she said, were like confessionals. You saw a private vision of yourself.”
Several of the stories are populated with writers or artists, but aside from that similarity the stories are not clearly connected. This becomes immediately apparent with the second story, “Traveling Light,” where there are no obviously recurring characters from the first story, neither is there any regional similarity, as each story is set in a different place. The lack of a stronger thread between the stories makes for a somewhat jarring read. One hopes to get to know the characters and follow them through the book to some sort of resolution, but this does not happen.
There are some outliers here, such as “A Neighboring State,” a sad story about a runaway daughter, but most of the stories are filled with people contemplating their intellectual, creative, or romantic lives. If only they were more likeable perhaps they could have drawn us in. But their lives, peppered with things like Godiva chocolates, trendy Chemex coffee makers, and academia, puts a certain socioeconomic label on them that adds to their whiff of inaccessibility.
Readers who consider written stream of consciousness cerebral might be satisfied with Origin Stories, but those who prefer stories and characters that welcome you in and immerse you in their world may be left unsatisfied.