Some of Them Will Carry Me

August 1, 2022
A debut collection of three dozen stories with the logic of dreams. Like dreams, Scodellaro's stories can feel like a jumble of puzzle pieces that are hard to put together. Take, for example, "Freedom of White Boys in the Sand," which opens with a girl shouting obscenities at a group of White men, who enjoy a kind of privileged obliviousness while also being on the verge of extinction. Meanwhile, other people dressed in secondhand suits watch her, speculating about why she's there: Is she a widow looking for a new partner? Or a ghost in search of her murderer? Later, she reveals she's trying to find her sister, who went off to buy a helicopter. Instead of featuring conventional plots, these pieces, whose protagonists are often Black women, map physical spaces, focus on characters' bodies and gestures, and inventory objects. All this detail, however, is the opposite of grounding: instead, it creates a profound feeling of dislocation and disconnection, one of the collection's themes. In "YYYY," the narrator prides himself on being observant but fails to see the important things--like his companion's tears. Another character notes that while objects can "tether us," they also "can be meaningless garbage." While some of the longer stories feel wandering, Scodellaro's shorter ones often land with striking intensity. "Cabbage, The Highest Arch" paints an incisive portrait of a woman in two pages, while "The Foot of the Tan Building" contemplates our indifference to tragedy by examining the body of a woman who jumped to her death, "her running shoes exposed, her childlike ankles exposed," and "Forty-Seven Days Ago" uses a grocery list's worth of liquids--"vegetable broth, apple cider vinegar, low sodium soy sauce, extra virgin olive oil..."--to evoke the narrator's heartbrokenness. Singular stories that will reward patient readers.

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Starred review from October 31, 2022
Scodellaro debuts with a wild and wonderful collection of surreal and enigmatic accounts of sex, relationships, and encounters with strangers. The one-page opener, “The Cord,” offers an electric invitation to Scodellaro’s world of strange possibilities. In it, a woman meets a man on a bus and, from the seat next to his, guides his hand under her skirt. Then, with the fingers that were inside her, the man pulls the cord for his stop. “Now I’m on the cord,” the woman narrates, “and soon others will pull it... and some of them will carry me.” Tenuous connections such as this drive other stories. In “Triangle,” a woman observes a couple on the street and follows them home into their building. “The Balcony” concerns a woman who is seeking peace while her apartment is being renovated, and she begins having sex with a woman from the construction crew. “Spalding,” a highlight, finds a woman named Jazmynn sleeping among belongings left by her ex. Then a strange woman visits and spends the night, and Jazmynn makes room for her on the bed amid her old partner’s rusted bike, his basketball, and items from the pantry. The stories aren’t linked in the conventional sense, but once the reader adjusts to the author’s vision, they suggest a unified meaning. It’s an auspicious and consistently suprising first outing.

Starred review from September 15, 2022
This debut collection is not to be missed. Some as short as a paragraph, or even a sentence, Scodellaro's stories capture a broad spectrum of life's joy, disgust, complexity, and unusual specificity that yet contains multitudes. One favorite among favorites is a story in which, through a hole in the floor, Kendra's son sees Y's in the room's corners and a blood spot on a woman's jeans, of which he knows the cause, but he does not see what might matter most. Another favorite tells of the yearslong relationship among seven people who connect and align in dozens of different subgroups while remaining a co-sleeping unit, undone by the purchase of a mirror. Scodellaro centers the lived experience of Black women in her stories, with a style that demonstrates a profound level of creativity and play, using footnotes, offset dialogue blocks, recipes, and other techniques that add richness and layers. The opening piece lays the book's strongly feminist groundwork, as a woman on a bus inserts a man's fingers inside her, and her story moves from shame to collective care while inverting power structures. Readers encountering this extraordinary book for the first time will rejoice.

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