Amy Stuber’s story collection Sad Grownups is a stunning debut filled with marvelously complex characters.
Morgan Talty wrote of the book:
“If emotions had geographical locations, then Amy Stuber’s deeply moving short story collection Sad Grownups took me to those places, but in no way was it like riding a Greyhound bus, hitting each city, each emotion, one at a time. Each story took me to the joyfully complex, lovingly hated yet adored world as it is today, and did so with some of the funniest and saddest characters I’ve read in quite some time. Reading these stories, I lost myself, and when I put the book down, I found myself anew. Sad Grownups is a remarkable debut story collection by a writer who I already want more from.”
In her own words, here is Amy Stuber’s Book Notes music playlist for her story collection Sad Grownups:
Most of my best memories involve music: biking at night to the Replay Lounge to see whatever band had made it to town, driving to the Alley Cat every other day after high school to look for records with my brother, rooting around antique store bins in central Kansas with my now-husband looking for albums, doing “drive arounds” with my kids where the whole point is looking at the sky and birds and houses while listening to music. Music has inspired just about everything I’ve ever written.
The list below is long – apologies in advance, but for me these songs all have connections to the stories either because I listened to them while writing or because, retrospectively, they make sense linked to the stories’ themes or characters. Some songs are favorites, but others are just songs I was listening to while writing but maybe don’t listen to so much anymore. I’ll look at this list in a week and think, “Damn it! I forgot all the songs I really like!”
Anyway, thanks for looking at my list, which goes in the order of my collection, Sad Grownups, a book about gender, capitalism, climate change, family, parenthood, growing up, and how to live in the world without being crushed by it.
Day Hike
This story – which has two parallel-track narratives that end up interweaving in little ways – starts with a couple on vacation in Colorado, hiking, arguing about whether to have kids, when they encounter a man who is kind of subtly but then increasingly nefarious. The second narrative thread focuses on two friends, both writers, drinking and talking about their work while one is quietly envious and insecure. Both threads are about building a self and doing so while dragging around the weight of parents and past. I was listening to a lot of Herbie Hancock while writing the part about the women and the frenetic-ness of “Cantaloupe Island,” the way it builds, all the parts and pieces, reflects their story. Then I think Best Coast’s “Happy,” the way the repeated “I’m happy” seems both aspirational and arch, makes me think of the one writer’s attempts not to care about her friend’s success, her efforts to find her own place where she can be okay.
Little Women
I don’t know, I think women in a themed TikTok group house pretending to be theLittle Women for likes but also sitting in a hot tub at the edge of the desert at 2 am would listen to Bratmobile’s “Cherry Bomb.”
Dead Animals
If you had a bad babysitter and she put you in increasingly dangerous situations and then went home to feel morose and send sexual messages to strangers in other parts of the world, and then you and the babysitter decided to release a lot of other people’s dogs for no real reason at all, that babysitter might be one part “Communist Daughter” (Neutral Milk Hotel) and one part “Lonely Woman” (Ornette Coleman) with maybe a dash of the live version of “Crosseyed and Painless” (The Talking Heads).
Camp Heather
There’s a lot of regret in this story, but also (I hope) some humor. There’s a moment when the main character, a sixty-something camp counselor at a religious rehab camp for entitled teenagers, jumps from a tall wooden platform onto a plastic-y pillow blob. It’s a moment of uncertainty and then release and abandon, and I think the song “The Vagabond” by Air represents that moment. Then the underlying kind of jagged sadness of the story is maybe a little “Thrasher” by Neil Young and “Break it Up” by Patti Smith.
People’s Parties
This story, which I tried to turn into a novel that didn’t totally succeed and that I’ll probably revisit, revolves around three generations of women living in San Francisco, and the grandmother is very much a Joni Mitchell knock-off. So, obviously, Joni’s “People’s Parties,” but also, “Don’t Interrupt the Sorrow,” which is a song I’ve loved for decades that I think never gets old.
Doctor Visit
This is a story about getting older, being an aging body in the world, while still being a person, physical, sexual, and full of all the same emotions you might have had at 20, but constantly being told things about your body. I listened to these two songs when writing this: NoName’s “Shadow Man” and Helene Smith’s “Pain in My Heart.” To me, they are kind of two sides of the same coin. Sadness and beauty.
Cinema
The sadness of this story, up against the backdrop of Halloween in a small town and a movie theater showing an Italian movie about aesthetic, beautiful love, is probably the book’s biggest sadness. I never thought I could write about child death, but this story is about that, and I think the song “The Space Between” (Joanna Brouk) kind of represents a weird unknowable place, with “How Could Anybody Feel at Home” by Open Mike Eagle representing the contrast/backdrop of the story (still with a slightly sad undercurrent but also active and moving).
Sad Grownups
Two kind of has-been late teenagers plot a robbery while spending nights in the attic of one of their mother’s houses, all in the name of love or obsession. Oh, there’s a shooting, but everyone lives. This is a kind of jangly story, and I think it pairs with Brian Eno’s “Another Green World,” and also “Oh! Sweet Nothin” by the Velvet Underground or “Run, Run, Run” – I can’t decide! Both!
More Fun in the New World
A mother and daughter got to Vegas after the suicide of the daughter’s father/mother’s husband, and they end up with strangers in a hotel room in a hotel whose entrance is shaped like a lion’s head. David Bowie’s “Five Years,” is referenced in the story, but I also think Dum Dum Girls “Jail La La” really fits, and for the story’s end, “The Pacific,” by Willie Dunn.
The Game
When writing this story, I started with an image of the main character, Sage, as a younger woman roller skating through an LA loft while blasting Lupe Fiasco’s “Hurt Me Soul.” So that’s the one that connects most to this story for me.I also imagine the two couples out on the stone patio listening to William Onyeabor’s “Atomic Bomb,” because Monty, one of the four characters, collects records and might think this one is obscure enough to make him seem interesting to his new friends.
Wizards of the Coast
For a few years, when my daughter had trouble falling asleep, when she was much younger, she had a routine that involved needing to listen to John Phillips’s “Topanga Canyon” twice and Joni Mitchell’s “California” once before she could begin to fall asleep. I think we listened to those two songs at least a thousand times. (John Phillips is kind of a horrible person, so we have had many conversations since then about “art monsters,” but that’s a sidenote.) Anyway, those are the two I think of when thinking of this one, a story with shifting perspectives that revolves around a child’s Harry Potter-themed birthday party in Topanga Canyon, but that also deals with addiction, assault, infidelity, and the shitty-ness of capitalism.
Edward Abbey Walks into a Bar
This is a road trip story, and so I think Pavement’s “Conduit for Sale,” which talks about a place between here and there being better than here or there fits. Also, the story references Bruce Springsteen’s “Badlands,” and I listened to Sterolab when writing this, I believe, and I think the song “Metronomic Underground” fits. I’ve been taking lengthy road trips my whole life, usually about 70 hours of driving each summer. It’s a big environmental nightmare, I realize, but I try really hard to offset it in other ways.
Corvids and Their Allies
I could not have written this story about a cult in northern California in the 1970s-1980s without listening to Pharoah Sanders’ “Summun Bukmun Umyun” and “The Creator Has a Master Plan” about a hundred times.
Dick Cheney is Not My Father
For reasons I cannot fully explain, Television’s “Marquee Moon” and the Super Djata Band’s “Fon Gnana Kouma” are two I listened to while writingthis story about old-fashioned notions of masculinity and success hitting against more contemporary ideas of gender and making life meaningful. Also about how we learn to both live with our parents and eventually let go. (By the way, my younger kid is very into music, and it’s been incredibly fun to be introduced to things by him or to have him be like, “Did you know this song by ___, it’s so good” and to have it be something I loved and listened to way back when. “Marquee Moon” is one of those.)
Ghosts
Another robbery! I guess this book has two of them. In this story, Ghosts, a college-aged girl robs a bank and then ends up semi-kidnapping (loosely, not really, not to make light of this actual crime) two young kids. There’s a little sub-narrative about the motivations of Pac-Man ghosts that was kind of fun to research and write. Anyway, when I think of the feel of this story, I think of dusk, and that fits with Mac Miller’s “2009” and Synthesis’ “Vane.”
Our Female Geniuses
A creepy private school event where young women are being auctioned off against the backdrop of a woman having a public affair with a newscaster while two women on a balcony, serving as the story’s chorus, witness them together. Hole’s “Rock Star” is the woman shirking convention, and New Order’s “Age of Consent” is the auction or the girls or the chorus. I’m not totally sure. At the end of the story, there’s a moment of mounting tension, a kind of pre-chaos, and I think the Rolling Thunder Review version of Bob Dylan’s “Knocking on Heaven’s Door” is that.
The Last Summer
This is going to be a sort of weird combo, but I think the main character of this story, a middle-aged adjunct poetry teacher who is dying of cancer and who is a little bit of a misanthrope and would probably think he was punker than The Clash somehow would still be represented by The Clash’s “Clampdown,” and then the ending of the story, for me, seems like the beautiful summer-night chaos of Animal Collective’s “Grass.”
Amy Stuber’s writing has appeared in the New England Review, Flash Fiction America, Ploughshares, The Idaho Review, Cincinnati Review, TriQuarterly, American Short Fiction, Joyland, and elsewhere. She’s the recipient of The Missouri Review’s 2023 William Peden Prize in fiction, winner of the 2021 Northwest Review Fiction Prize, and runner-up for the 2022 CRAFT Short Fiction Prize. Her work received a special mention in Pushcart Prize XLIV, appeared on the Wigleaf Top 50 in 2021, has been nominated for Best of the Net, and appears in Best Small Fictions 2020 and 2023. She has a PhD in English, has taught college writing, and worked in online education for many years.You can find her work at www.amystuber.com.