"Who is't can read a woman?"
This collection of short stories focuses on women who aren’t extraordinary—but who, it makes clear, still have stories to tell.
Review by Whitney Rio-Ross
When I heard that Julia Ridley Smith had a short story collection forthcoming, I was delighted. Her memoir-in-essays, The Sum of Trifles, is an impressive mix of humor and pathos. When I heard her new book was called Sex Romp Gone Wrong, I was more amused than alarmed. Plus, I enjoyed the idea of carrying it into my doctor’s waiting room and making the female nurse laugh. Unfortunately, my usual nurse had been replaced by an off-brand Fabio with disconcertingly expressive eyebrows.
Before you raise your eyebrows too high, let me assure you that most of Ridley Smith’s stories aren’t half as scandalous as the title. Yes, there’s plenty of sex in its varied forms— business transaction, means of procreation, side-effect of existential crisis, lovemaking, and rape. But this isn’t a book about sex; it’s about women as whole people, a book that passes the Bechdel test while still incorporating plenty of straight marriages. The relationships that feel most alive, though, are those between women—friends, sisters, mothers and daughters. Those relationships resound because they all share something important—they are messy.
The women in these stories are disasters to varying degrees. One middle-aged mom grows obsessed with her former best friend when their children meet over a decade later. A lonely divorcee can’t get her son and daughter to be at the same gravesite. A young woman who recently lost her parents gives up on a budding friendship after a conflict. The prize for walking catastrophe, though, goes to the protagonist in “Cleopatra’s Needle,” a petulant young woman having an aimless affair with a middle-aged family friend. As I read her story, I realized that I loved this anti-hero, and not simply because I couldn’t stop snorting at her extravagant lies and ridiculous fantasies. Then I realized that she reminded me of my favorite TV protagonist—Fleabag.
I could write an entire thesis about why I love Fleabag. The humor, the artfully broken fourth wall, the unbearable family dinners—they’re all gold. But, in short, what makes that show so unique is how a profoundly messy female character, the kind who would usually be flattened into a punchline, is revealed to be a person of depth. She shows that a woman can be hilarious and heartbroken, an utter disaster who is still capable of loving and being loved. I’d seen similar characters in TV shows before, but they were male. Similarly, the protagonists in Sex Romp Gone Wrong struck me because I have rarely encountered such well-crafted, heartfelt chaos in female characters, and I think that’s because in real life, women don’t have permission to claim such a complex existence.
I’m that kind of woman. Most women I know are.
The internet has plenty of funny content on the everyday, unglamorous plights of women, but it usually comes in the form of memes or a Reductress headline. (No disrespect to Reductress, which is a prophet of the female Millennial experience.) I regularly come across social media posts acknowledging impossible beauty standards, the cost of motherhood, and the underlying fear of violence when on a first date with a man. I chuckle in recognition, letting the cleverly phrased observation distract me from potential despair over the truth being observed. On the other hand, I have read a hundred (sometimes rightfully) livid think-pieces on women’s woes, determined to wring as much pain as possible from every hint of patriarchy. Personally, I am too exhausted by the patriarchy to scream a litany of all the ways it’s wronged me. How would my voice hold up, and when would I find time to buy throat lozenges?
Ridley Smith rejects this false dichotomy of women needing to either laugh off the abyss or hurl themselves into it. Her writing is indeed hilarious, be it her descriptions (the rural radio “disintegrated into nothing but static and Jesus“) or her characters’ internal dialogue. “Hot Lesbian Vampire Magic School,” written as a ballet script created by teenage girls, could be read with a laugh track. Still, despite sometimes poking fun at her protagonists (especially those who can never laugh at themselves), Ridley Smith takes her characters seriously. These are not aspirational women. They are not gorgeous or wealthy or particularly successful in their careers. None of the mothers are going to win parenting awards, and it’s easy to imagine most of the married characters happier without their husbands. But Ridley Smith says that their stories—with conflict that is more domestic than dramatic—are still worth telling. It turns out that generational grief doesn’t always have to play out in violence or substance abuse; sometimes grief is passed down through a family heirloom. And contrary to what I learned in high school English classes, extramarital affairs can end in tragedy that doesn’t involve walking into the ocean or an oncoming train.
I believe the accomplishment of Sex Romp Gone Wrong is best encapsulated in its title story, which isn’t about an orgy. A woman and her husband are trying to conceive a second child, but the plans are foiled when their teenage daughter tags along on a conference trip. The story is simple but riveting, especially when the perspective shifts from mother to daughter. The disagreements and affection that divide and bind them felt like they were taken out of my eighth-grade diary. What begins as an awkward comedy moves into a tragedy of longing for the past and then into a painfully realistic coming-of-age story. The plot lasts for less than two full days, but those twenty-one pages held a lifetime for me. Frustration, yearning, grief, love, fear—it was all there, and all in scenes where I could easily imagine myself. Very little happens, but by the last paragraph I saw that the characters and relationship will be profoundly changed.
This story and the others in the collection remind me that the lives of women most literature deems too uninteresting or disheveled or inconsistent can, in fact, offer captivating and valuable stories. I’m that kind of woman. Most women I know are. Maybe a mother is worth listening to even if she doesn’t have decent business cards and is weeks behind on laundry. Maybe the combination of my empty womb and my propensity for stealing flowers holds a profound human truth. Maybe we only need a few pages to make you laugh and break your heart.
Whitney Rio-Ross holds a Master’s in Religion and Literature from Yale Divinity School. Her writing has appeared in Sojourners, Reflections, America Magazine, LETTERS JOURNAL, The Cresset, St. Katherine Review, The Other Journal, and elsewhere. She is the author of the poetry chapbook Birthmarks and lives in Nashville, Tennessee, with her husband.
Sex Romp Gone Wrong was published by Blair Publishing on February 6, 2024. You can purchase a copy from the publisher here.
