Baby of the family Stories

Hayley Kelsey

Book - 2011

These seven stories explore the baby-boom generation, now technically adults, who are still grappling to grow up in the post-civil rights, post-hippie, post-anti-war, post-feminist era that formed them. The characters struggle toward a hard-won maturity through the stranglehold of the 1950s Cold War, sexual revolution, Yuppie prosperity, and the Digital Age. In the title story, a childlike woman, unable to conceive, can’t summon the courage to inject her diabetic father with insulin until the memory of a disastrous early experiment in femininity—an ear-piercing gone awry and its unhealed scar tissue—hands her the instrument to effect both rescue and revenge. In “War Brides,” a reluctant bride and a hopeful one on opposite sides of... an ethnic divide and envious of each other’s cultures square off over the same man. In “Learning to Lie,” a boy gets a life-and-death survival lesson in sacrificing the truth—and himself—at the hands of his aging has-been athlete father on a hunting trip. more