Sad Grownups By Amy Stuber Review by Molly McGinnis

SAD GROWNUPS by Amy Stuber

Review by Molly McGinnis

Publisher: Stillhouse Press

Publication Date: Oct. 8, 2024

ISBN: 978-0-9969816-6-8

Pages: 224 

Surface-level observations often pass for wisdom on the internet. Ideas replicate across X and TikTok, echoing theories that gifted children become jaded adults, or that a writer’s identity determines the topics she can cover. Some of these ideas are not inherently bad, just half-baked. Do all gifted children become depressed adults, or is it understandably depressing to grow up and discover the limits of one’s gifts? Amy Stuber’s titular story in her debut collection, Sad Grownups, posits that it has something to do with unreached or exaggerated potential. But if Stuber considers herself a sad grownup, it must be for other reasons, because the stories in this book wink at their potential and then explode past it, creating a gorgeous, complicated universe.

In the first story, “Day Hike,” Stuber takes us through a braided narrative: the short story a woman is workshopping, and the story she’s living. The narrator’s trusted beta reader, an accomplished writer named Sela who exudes literary coolness, is a cynic but not a skeptic. She wears charm necklaces, she charms her coworkers. Her edginess seems learned, rather than earned, and gleaned from online etiquette. Of the narrator’s story, about a mid-life queer couple on a few journeys, she says, “So, don’t take this the wrong way, but I was wondering. Aren’t Alice and Renee each a bit too much of a type? I wanted them to be maybe more nuanced. Also, I don’t know if you can write about lesbians, like, if you’re allowed. You’re what, loosely bisexual at best?” The issue of who gets to write what is often on trial in the literary community, but here, it’s not so much an ethics question as it is a narrative challenge. I don’t have a solution to the problem of identity and authorship, but I do know that when it comes to short stories, Stuber seems capable of writing about anything. 

Given her range – in this 17-story collection, one finds everything from mischievous children to a woman reeling from her own violent crimes – it is telling that Sad Grownups’ recurring themes are environmentalist and feminist. And they are usually just that – concerns that hum behind the conversation, a reflexive worry, a flinch before the seasons change. Reading several of these stories, particularly “Little Women,” “People’s Parties,” “More Fun in the New World,” “Edward Abbey Walks in a Bar,” and “Our Female Geniuses,” one experiences an awareness, even the prick of disobedience, but less of the activism and thrashing protest of older fictional rebels. I wonder if this is in part because the cultural dissidents of earlier American fiction experienced the pain of oppression and destruction as acute, and now that we are several decades into these discussions, the pain – for those of us who are privileged enough to have some distance, at least – has become chronic. And a response to chronic pain looks different. One learns to live around it, and to savor any moment of reprieve.  

Stuber’s moments of reprieve are dealt sparingly and arrive with a welcome weightlessness. One of her most elegant breaks occurs in the middle of “Our Female Geniuses” with a shift in familiarity. A young woman slips away for a night walk on the outskirts of Washington, DC, and meets a whimsical stranger. Here is a snapshot of the encounter:

“The whole zoo was cawing and calling, the animals, celebratory in the absence of humans, or so it seemed to the girl. The woman in the silk robe had a flask, and she offered it to the girl, and she drank from it.

‘This is the best time,’ the woman said. ‘Empty, middle of the night. The nobody that’s not there, or is it the nothing? I can’t remember.’

The girl wasn’t sure what the woman was talking about, but she was happy to sit in silence, happy, too, when after how much time the girl couldn’t tell, the woman stood, waved, and walked off, and the girl was left with the dark greenery around her closing in in the most pleasing way. 

The girl wanted, heretofore or whatever other archaic word might make it official, for all her interactions to be like that, easy, with a minimal exchange of words and clear understanding of purpose, and just women.”

This scene would be paradise for many of Stuber’s characters: the greenery, the quiet, the world-of-only-women. The absence of social media adages. And yet paradise shifts from story to story. In “Dick Cheney Was Not my Father,” the narrator’s aging, macho father takes his family on a road trip to see snow geese and in a nerve-wracking moment, accelerates into a scene that is too beautiful to spoil here. Despite the drama of parents and crushed expectations, moments like that are almost good enough to redeem us – as parents, sad grownups, or not-so-gifted children. 

Stuber seems to take an interest in redemption. It’s clearest in “Cinema,” whose protagonist sifts through the rubble of her own actions primarily in search of two things: a reason to go on living, and a punishment greater than those she has already been dealt. In the collection’s final story, “The Last Summer,” the lens flips, and Adam Zanger, a dying man, moves begrudgingly from his kitchen to his backyard and back again, tending a quiet existence of weed-smoking and Dead Kennedys needlepoint projects. For Adam, it’s existence that needs to explain itself. His routine is interrupted only when two sorority girls decide to use his garden for a photoshoot. Adam is funny and judgmental, but his malaise eventually burns off in the light of an unexpected friendship. His is a settled epiphany: 

“On the way back from the lake, they’re wet on the leather seats. They stick, and the stickiness is beautiful and not bothersome. They’re laughing on the speed bumps. The sound of the cicadas is delightful and not irksome. No cars pass them. They sing, and it fills the car with lovely noise. The lights are a beautiful blur alongside their speeding. If he closes his eyes, it is always nighttime and summer. He can never not think of this.” 

If Flannery O’Connor’s stories tend to spin on an axis of grace denied, Amy Stuber’s spiral toward some higher dignity via their steadfast attention to detail and tireless appeals to goodness. The pages of Sad Grownups are indeed a world of nighttime and summer, and Stuber’s willingness to risk sentimentality to reach for something true and valuable about humanity is a refreshing turn in difficult times. And isn’t it so true, cliché as it may be, that we are always alive in difficult times? Concern for others, a longing for adventure, a drive to leave the world just a little better than we found it – these qualities are timeless. Sad Grownups is sure to be timeless as well and is a necessary companion to an uncertain century. 

Molly McGinnis studied literature at American University. Her work has appeared in Guernica, CQ Researcher, CommonLit, The Sierra Nevada Review, The Journal of Clinical Oncology: Oncology Practice, and elsewhere. She lives and works in Washington, DC. 

Amy Stuber’s work has appeared most recently in Electric Lit, The Rumpus, Colorado Review, The Masters Review, Missouri Review, and elsewhere. She’s an editor for Split Lip Magazine. Her debut story collection, Sad Grownups, was released from Stillhouse Press October 2024.  

16 April 2025