That night, Ally was absorbed in the book she’d been reading the last two weeks. Thora had seen a lot of people carrying the book around the Center: making a big deal of bringing it to lunch, women squeezing the hardcover tightly to their chests as they walked to Restorative Yoga.
“Can I see?” Thora said.
Ally passed it over. Thora read just a few pages. It was about a plucky doll-maker in occupied Paris during World War II. It seemed like a book for people who hated books.
– Emma Cline, Daddy
It is no secret that I consider Emma Cline to be the most talented author writing in America today. The queen of understatement and self-control, she can write about the most mundane moments in life with a surgical precision that slices your heart. Daddy is a short story collection written closer to the style of Cline’s extraordinary The Guest than her less successful The Girls.
What’s really interesting about the very young Cline is that she writes about the middle age a lot more convincingly than about childhood and teenage years. “Marion”, the only unsuccessful story in Daddy is a Bildungsroman, and not a particularly great one.
The subject that Cline dominates to absolute perfection is that of middle-aged men whose relationships with their young adult children have grown distant, leaving the fathers bereft, confused, and close to exploding with pain. She never looks at the father – child relationship through the eyes of the child. In Daddy, fathers’ pain spills all over the pages.
Not all stories are about fatherhood. A few are about young people not being able to handle cancel culture and other online phenomena. There’s a story that gently mocks #MeTootery, without ever naming it, and leaving the readers a lot of space to figure out their own meaning.
A sensationally talented writer.
Clarissa's Blog 
Yes, I agree. Amazing short stories. I am very happy that I read them and also “The Guest”, thanks to you! 🙂 I would not have read anything else from her after “The Girls” which did not convince me…
Btw, are you going to read “On all fours” by Miranda July? When I read it I was thinking often about what you would say about it, which is the opposite of what most critics say. I expect you would say that it is about a woman who tragically destroys her family life following her whims while most say it is about a woman who breaks her chains etc.. I’d love to read your review, although I feel like I know what you are going to say. 🙂
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I’ll check it out, thank you! There’s a hallowed tradition of a 40+ female Bildungsroman, and it would be interesting to see how this novel inscribes itself into it.
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