Reviewed by Michelle Ross

In her debut story collection, This. This. This. Is. Love. Love. Love., Jennifer Wortman writes frankly about depression and other mental forces that hold us back from getting to where we'd like to be, from being whom we'd like to be. Her characters watch too much television, struggle to get out of bed, drink too much, get bogged down by indecision, sleep with too many people who don't care about them, cheat on the people who do care about them, worry about what traits their children may have inherited from them, smoke too much because it keeps them from drinking, hate and envy others who have "that glow that comes with love easily won."

If this list brings to mind a lot of other fiction, know that in Wortman's hands, these familiar human struggles are not rendered predictably. Wortman's far too smart a writer for that, her sensibility and voice too original. These stories are so chock full of stand-out, stick-in-your-head writing that I could not stop myself from marking up the pages. I mean passages such as this one: "But if I don't approach him, why am I here? If I do approach him, why am I engaged to my boyfriend? Why, at this moment, do I believe my engagement doesn't exist? When you leave the kitchen, does the table within still exist? Common sense says of course. Philosophy deliberates. The animal says, where's the food in the room I'm in now?" And this: "Depression and I had dated off and on for years. And sometimes depression fucked me good. But I didn't want to marry it, and the day I called the hotline, my depression seemed a final fate: an arranged marriage I lacked the strength to defy." And this: "I love the kind of man who will put a gun to his head, and therefore, by implication, my head. My husband, though pissed, will not put a gun to his head over any of this, and I also love the kind of man who will not put a gun to his head over any of this. But it turns out the gun wins."

Among the book's cast of characters is the woman in "Love You. Bye" who is obsessed with her psychic friend's ability to see light cords between people, as well as between people and their cellphones. She has a long history of cheating on boyfriends and then being cheated on and dumped in return. In the present story she's engaged and she extolls the many things she loves about her fiancé, yet she fantasizes about the guy from whom she buys her first smartphone. Of her fiancé she says: "My boyfriend says he will never cheat on me. Cheaters disgust him. His father cheated on his mother. His ex-girlfriend cheated on him. When someone cheats in a movie, he turns from the screen and groans. Therefore, I've long expected he will cheat on me, just as the fire-and-brimstone televangelist will inevitably reveal himself as a pedophile." Then, "If he's the man who will one day cheat on me despite his best efforts and deeply held values, then I am the woman who may behave with impunity."

In "I'm Dying Without You, Tom," Shelly, a lonely, struggling college student, receives phone calls from an unhinged woman looking for her son. Shelly fantasizes about the son the woman accuses Shelly of hiding from her. She says to the woman, "You're not listening. Tom isn't here. I wish he were, though." Soon she becomes obsessed with trying to help the woman. She enlists her roommate's boyfriend to pretend to be the estranged son. Along the way, Shelly experiences her own delusions, mistakes the roommate's boyfriend's sympathy for love or something like it. 

"Which Truth, Patricia?" is a metafictional story about fiction writing and autobiography. Just when we think we know who the story is about, who is doing the telling, Wortman throws in a wrench. And then another and another. She writes, "Let's pretend I'm telling a story. Let's pretend the story's not telling me."

In "Slumber Party," a mother is disturbed by her young daughter not being invited to a popular girl's party. The rejection is too resonant. When later her daughter brings the popular girl home and boasts that the girl can hold a handstand longer than anyone, the mother commands the girl to demonstrate, and the girl does:

After a time, Theresa threatened to fall, and she adjusted her hands, regaining balance. She seemed invincible, holding herself up like that. I envied her, this wan, gangly ten-year-old girl. My hatred swelled, and I itched to kick her in the face, an urge so horrifying I did the only thing I could think of to distract myself. I stepped forward and pushed her leg, not hard, but just enough to ruin her equilibrium.

Wortman handles depression like a docent introducing a crowd to a venomous serpent. In "Slumber Party," she writes, "What many people do not know about those who frequently expect the worst is that we have an equally strong impulse to hope for the unreasonable best." She knows this animal. She is an expert on its diet, its behaviors, its needs.

Also, Wortman is very funny. I laughed so many times reading this book. Often this laughter stung a little, such as when the protagonist of "Love You. Bye," says, "When I tire of the endless, unanswerable questions inspired by phone boy's Facebook picture, I find my show on Netflix, which reduces my constant questions to one urgent query: 'What happens next?'" or when Annie in the title story says, "Walking along Colfax, my heart still raced. And not just from fear. I felt like a kid at a fair. Maybe the games cost too much and the rides scared me. But still, a fair! I could step on a side street and buy crystal meth. I could find strangers to pay me for sex. Everywhere, chances to ruin my life. And so everywhere, chances not to." Or when Noah in "Which Truth, Patricia?" says to his girlfriend's accusation that he's using her, "Of course I am. I use you and you use me. That's what love is." 

The stories in This. This. This. Is. Love. Love. Love. dig deep into the ways our minds betray and unravel us. They tap into the ways our minds ricochet between conflicting thoughts. As Wortman wrote in Monkeybicycle's "If My Book" series, "If my book were a cookbook, it would be the Joy of Not Cooking and also There Is No Joy and also There's Lots of Joy: Stop Being Such a Pessimist." We're lucky her companionable voice is here to keep us company, to make the task of enduring our minds' clatter a little less lonely.