This Book Changed My Life: 'Why Did I Ever' by Mary Robison

With special guest, Kimberly King Parsons.

Welcome back to TBCML – a series where some of my favorite authors and readers share books that absolutely changed the game for them. This week, I am thrilled to feature a pick by Kimberly King Parsons, author of We Were the Universe and National Book Award Nominee for her short story collection Black Light. Kimberly's work is a poignant, psychedelic breath of fresh air. And her voice, whip-smart and hilarious, is one that we so desperately need in these uncertain times.

Don’t miss what she’s up to on Instagram!

Without further ado, let’s get into Kimberley’s life-changing read:

KKP: I fell for short stories long before I ever loved a novel. For most of my writing life, story collections served up everything I wanted in literature: compression, precision, potency, not a single wasted line. Amy Hempel, Denis Johnson, Isaac Babel, Barry Hannah—these were the writers I feverishly admired, doing work that felt transcendent and urgent. Even when I’d find myself reading really good novels, none of them lit me up quite like short fiction could.

None of them, that is, until Mary Robison’s Why Did I Ever. Told in 536 short, fragmented chapters, Robison manages the lyricism of poetry alongside the charming, propulsive voice of a very spiky, very bonkers, relentlessly hilarious narrator. Money Breton is a Hollywood script doctor who frequently leaves her troubled life in LA to crisscross highways of the American South, high on Ritalin. She traverses thousands of miles, but she can’t escape her problems: tax debt, bad relationships with immature men, the many ridiculous screenplays she’s tasked with fixing, and (the true source of her nearly inexpressible pain) a young adult son who has recently survived a harrowing sexual assault.

The novel is atypical in that it is organized less like a narrative and more like the mind on stimulants: a visual cue brings up a seemingly unrelated memory, a turn of phrase triggers something we won’t understand until many chapters later, concepts are mentioned and then lost forever, jokes pop up in strange or inappropriate moments to counter absolutely unthinkable violence. Why Did I Ever has the breathless, urgent prose I'd been seeking in short fiction but the scope, depth of feeling, and character development of a novel.

Robison also reminds us that as writers we choose our readers. For every unusual move she’s made here, a reader decides if they are willing to come along for this totally batshit (and totally worth it!) ride. We will be asked to reevaluate what we expect from a novel, and we will be reminded of the possibilities of language. Is this book for everyone? Absolutely not—but my life as a reader has been cleaved into the before and after, and I’m eternally grateful.

Yours,

Kim