Beautiful Girls

The stories in Beth Ann Bauman's debut collection explore the secret lives of girls and women. The characters who inhabit Beautiful Girls are the timid, the not-quite-fabulous, the public school Ophelias, who yearn for something grander than their current lot. In "True, " an exquisitely shy teenager tries to fathom the hidden secrets of beauty from a boy who's "the prettiest person in the entire school." A lonely divorcee in "Safeway" wanders the darkened aisles of a grocery store during a power outage and becomes "certain a touch of rot had taken root in her heart...and that she still might live better." In "Wildlife of America, " a jilted New Yorker flees to the safety and comfort of the suburbs only to find that the wilds of New Jersey are the same as anyplace else. A hapless young woman loses her laundry in "Wash, Rinse, Spin" and must resort to the decrepit wardrobe she wore while working in B movies, as her dying father fades in her hometown. And in the title story, friendship and sisterhood are challenged as voracious girls who long for love and admiration participate in a town pageant. Told with irresistible humor and a cockeyed economy, these stories illuminate the search for love, friendship, connection, and identity. I live in a studio apartment in Manhattan on a very busy street. Sirens, car alarms, horns, squealing brakes, shouting, and laughter have been background to almost all the stories in Beautiful Girls. Over the years I've gotten pretty good at closing off this world and its noises and entering the worlds of my stories. Lately, though, I've begun to consider my various writing practices. I like to write in my pajamas, for example, which can be a liability when I'mworking on the couch and wind up napping. I also wonder about the direction I'm facing when writing and if this has any effect on the work in a feng shui kind of way. What I've concluded is that some of the more lyrical passages have been written at my writing table facing uptown, while some of the feistier ones have been written on the couch facing downtown. I got the title for Beautiful Girls while sitting on the couch facing downtown. I was revising a scene where the mother of three girls tries to get them to locate the source of a stink in the basement, when the highly opinionated nine-year-old suddenly shouted in my ear, "We're beautiful girls! You can't expect us to go down there!" My semi-autobiographical story about a young woman and her dad's impending death was written exclusively on the couch. When I was ready to move from the handwritten page to the computer, my writing table was overloaded with papers and assorted crap, and I didn't want to take the time to weed through the piles. Instead, I set up my laptop on the ironing board, adjusted the height, and sitting in my pajamas on the couch I wrote "Wash, Rinse, Spin, " facing west, facing New Jersey, my homeland. What makes a great short story? Winning characters, writing that sings, insights into the world and our search for love and true friends, beauty and meaning...Beautiful Girls has all of these and more. Beth Ann Bauman writes with flair and humility and breathtaking grace. You're going to love these stories.--A.S.