The Collected Works of Jo Ann Beard

the SPectator 12 August 2023

Jo Ann Beard has said that one of the stories in this collection, although she does not specify which, took her more than 20 years to write and that there was a gap of eight months – during which she was working on the piece five days a week – between two of its sentences. It is true that her writing is remarkably condensed, not least in ‘Cheri’, the story of a real woman who had a particularly hideous case of terminal cancer (exacerbated by the fact that all pain medication made her vomit). Cheri Tremble contacted Jack Kevorkian, a euthanasia expert sometimes nicknamed ‘Dr Death’, so that he could help her end her life. As she begins to die, Cheri, in Beard’s version, wryly reflects: ‘The fear of dying tonight is nothing… compared to the fear of still being alive tomorrow morning.’

Beard has barely been published in the UK, but her fans include Jonathan Franzen, Sigrid Nunez and Jeffrey Eugenides. Mary Gaitskill has called her ‘a kind of literary celebrity that very few people have heard of’.

There is a warning in the introduction to her collected works: she thanks Tin House magazine’s editorial staff, who had previously published some of this collection, for printing her work ‘without undue fretting about genre’. Beard has not always been exact about which of her work is fiction and which memoir, so it seems best to consider it autobiographical fiction or creative non-fiction. 

‘Cheri’ is included in this collection but is also simultaneously published as a stand- alone novella and is based on a story that did not occur in Beard’s own life but one she has extensively researched. She has taken the same approach with ‘Werner’, about a man who jumped from a burning building and survived; and in ‘The Fourth State of Matter’ she writes about a shooting that took place at the University of Iowa, some of whose victims she knew. What unites the collection is that for the most part these are stories of the Midwest. A typical detail mentions an ‘old floor-to-ceiling down coat I bought in Ann Arbor in 1992 when I was having a midwestern-style nervous breakdown’. There are plenty of appealingly spirited middle-aged women enraged by husbands who have decided to leave them. One of these, the narrator of ‘The Boys of My Youth’, feels like a ‘rabid dog’ and says of the arrival of feminism in her life in 1976: ‘I’ve always had a tendency to be mean to men; now there’s a reason for it.’

There is plenty of violence and death in these pages – a dog is euthanised in ‘Last Night’ and a woman confronts an intruder in ‘The Tomb of Wrestling’ – but there is also hard-won, transcendent joy. This is perhaps most striking in ‘Cheri’, as the titular character, realising she will die, is overcome by the beauty of the world. It is not an uncommon sentiment, but here it is strikingly expressed:

And this, of course, is when the world turns glamorous. Her daughters look like movie stars in their low-slung pants and pale autumn complexions. The trees on her street vibrate in the afternoon sunlight, the dying leaves so brilliant that she somehow feels she’s never seen any of this before – fall, and the way the landscape can levitate with colour, and even her simple cup of green tea in the afternoons, with milk and honey in a thick white mug. Warm. Her hand curled around it, or the newspaper folded beside it, or a halved orange on a blue plate sitting next to it.

This review originally appeared in The Spectator