Reviewed by John Kazanjian

Mary South's debut short story collection, You Will Never Be Forgotten, is a sharp and moving look at the boundaries that measure and contain the human experience. Her narratives present separateness as the foundation for the struggle to form human connections, attain self-knowledge, and salvage parts of the unrecoverable past. Boundaries appear as crossable social borders, breakable existential partitions, and impermeable barriers of loss. She addresses primal sources of melancholy, and she does so with expertly crafted comedy.

South curates the reader's journey from the very beginning of the collection, providing gentle points of access into each story. She warms up the emotional palate with unique, often whimsical premises. A man stays at a hostel where his beloved breastfeeds other male guests. Three counselors must track down an escapee from a camp for recovering internet trolls. Elderly men in a nursing home call a sex hotline. These setups elicit laughs, and their developments tend to compound that effect as the reader is led through complex narrative landscapes.

But South's comedy serves a deeper purpose. It effectively lowers the reader's defenses, which results in a heightened level of connection with her text. Once we are fully immersed, South moves us deeper, through layers of increasing poignancy that lie beneath her humor. The story of the man who watches his beloved breastfeed other male guests tragically depicts love as the perpetual craving for an inaccessible sanctuary. South's escaped internet troll serves as a spiritual guide for the three pursuing camp counselors, leading them toward the edge of self-actualization. And the elderly men calling the sex hotline deliver a treatise on perpetual longing and incalculable loss.

The brilliance of South's writing is rooted in her ability to maneuver the emotional spectrum effortlessly, providing lively literary moments. She generates new shades of emotions through the friction created by spontaneous shifts in tone. Her worlds are similar to our own but are full of amplified uncanniness. They often address our temptations to defy life's natural order, demonstrating the consequences through elevated isolation.

In "Not Setsuko," a woman attempts to replicate her deceased daughter by reenacting the lost girl's memories with her second child. She learns the price of attempting to violate the separation of past and present. South moves us through the penalties of her actions, establishing a heart-wrenching treatise on surviving psychological and spiritual disintegration through the black hole of nostalgia.

While South is gentle with the reader's emotional movement, her examinations of life's brutality are delivered unmitigated. "You Will Never Be Forgotten," a story which appeared in The New Yorker, depicts a woman who follows her rapist on social media. Her surveillance crosses into the physical world and ultimately into forbidden spaces. The man is only identified as "the rapist," and the frequency with which this term is invoked does not lessen its potency. Rather, it increases it, jarring the reader as it sits in sentences beside descriptions of commonplace activities. It beats out a tempo to which the narrator descends into a hopeless view of the world. South moves us to despair, but not without noting the human spirit's desire and ability to survive.

Spiritual perseverance is also featured in "Frequently Asked Questions About your Craniotomy," where a neurosurgeon composes the titular document. The structure of the story mimics a FAQ article, listing questions above answers. The text becomes meta and the neurosurgeon disseminates her struggle as a widow raising two children while experiencing the existential fury that threatens to break her. The neurosurgeon moves along the border of despair, negotiating with an abysmal sense of meaninglessness – one that might only be thwarted with resilient mindfulness.

South's subversions of structure and tropes are effective, and they intimate both passion and respect for short form prose. But her choices do require the reader to keep an open mind. This collection challenges traditional methods of pairing premise and emotionality. The result is a philosophical discourse in which the reader should be prepared to participate. The process of consuming these stories is a unique textual experience, but one best served with active reading and critical thought. One navigates through more pathways in these stories than their first paragraphs might suggest. It's worth it, though, as one finds surprises, pathos, and access into literary arenas that offer fresh perspectives on common themes along the way.

South's comments on our boundaries might be most overt in "Realtor to the Damned." The narrator is a realtor who once bonded with his late wife by imagining the personalities of the recently deceased homeowners whose properties become his listings. The process of ascribing identities to these ghosts portrays personal sanctuaries as intermediary spaces between past and present, consciousness and nonexistence. Yet, it shows that one is not entirely powerless when addressing the separateness that shapes our lives and causes our pain. This story demonstrates a healthy way in which we might reach beyond our barriers and, in some fashion, retrieve what is lost by means of imagination and narrative. South presents this method as imperfect, ephemeral, and beautiful, but ultimately as inherently human.