UW Press: Minus One

“Doris Iarovici's compassionate, fiercely intelligent, and psychologically astute Minus One portrays characters recovering from loss. Their unending flexibility when things do not go as planned, their ability to witness turns of emotion from bliss to rage to grief and parlay them into pathways to change: these subtleties are stunningly portrayed and endlessly insightful.”
—Elizabeth Kadetsky, author of The Memory Eaters

By turns wrenching, transcendent, and haunting, these rich stories follow characters whose lives are upended by death, estrangement, and loss—and the ways they must negotiate loneliness and absence to rebuild their new realities. In intimate portraits, a psychiatrist analyzes the missed signs of her stepson's dangerous addiction, a resentful boy seeks revenge against his stepmother, a surgeon confronts his failed marriages, an artist searches for a new identity in widowhood, and a young dancer plots to escape a manipulative older partner.

Woven through this slim and powerful volume are astute observations on how pain and grief can be inherited from one generation to the next. With tenderness and honesty, Doris Iarovici explores the plunging depths of the human experience, lingering on moments of familial warmth and joy but never shying away from conflict and tension. Minus One reveals a glimmer of hope and possibility, even in our darkest times.

Author. Photo credit, Name Doris Iarovici is the author of American Dreaming and Other Stories. Her writing has appeared in numerous publications, including the New York Times, The Guardian, and Crab Orchard Review. She works as a psychiatrist at Harvard University.

“Minus One burns with a fiery, fierce empathy—in these stories, we find the most private strains of grief brought to the surface, where they spark like a live wire. Iarovici is a master of details that get under your skin, of lines that unexpectedly invert sympathy and galvanize story, of quiet moments that reveal the amplitude of loss.”
—Alexandra Kleeman, author of You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine

“Minus One shows the deep power of grief in its infinite guises. In each of these stories we see people facing life-altering loss: widows, children of divorce, couples on the precipice of breakup. The writing is crisp and original, the characters nuanced and engaging.”
—Peter Grimes