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Imagine Your Life Like This
Sarah Layden
“Well-written, varied, and intriguing, these stories are original and will stay with me for a long time.”
—Kelly Fordon, author of I Have the Answer
We all long for something; what if we get it?
The characters who inhabit Sarah Layden's short story collection are on the verge of change—if only they could see themselves and their situations with greater clarity. Caught in the midst of crises, they stumble toward the future without fully understanding their past. Layden’s deft, spare prose sketches worlds and lives with telling details, juggling disparate strands of identity and often revealing the deeper truths in unexpected moments of epiphany.
A bride-to-be puts on her detective hat when her groom goes missing. A woman returns to college after escaping an abusive marriage, only to discover her professor is a fraud. Reunited at a high school reunion, two former classmates completely misinterpret a critical incident from a decade prior. These and other characters find themselves lonely and in limbo, their self-identity as blurry as the old photographs they cling to with stubborn intensity.
Set mostly in the Midwest and upstate New York, Imagine Your Life Like This captures everyday Americans in all their discontent, misunderstandings, and dogged determination for a better world.
Sarah Layden, assistant professor of English at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, is the author of Trip Through Your Wires, a novel, and The Story I Tell Myself About Myself, winner of the Sonder Press Chapbook Competition. She is co-author with Bryan Furuness of The Invisible Art of Literary Editing.
Praise
“Layden’s vividly-drawn characters struggle to define themselves in relation to who they used to be, who they want to be, and who others imagine them to be. In the midst of their various crises, they behave badly, make mistakes, and want what they can’t have, and yet in spite of—or maybe because of—their fallibility, they remain sympathetic and lovable. Imagine Your Life Like This is a crisp, compassionate, and moving examination of the difficulty of seeing ourselves clearly and the pain of being seen by others in ways we can’t control.”
—Ashley Wurzbacher, author of Happy Like This
“Sarah Layden writes about loneliness and disconnection with authority and beauty. Her characters are often flawed people in the midst of difficult circumstances whose stories unravel in surprising ways. She is a writer to watch.”
—Marian Crotty, author of What Counts as Love
“Layden’s soaring themes encompass the full range of what it means to be human.”
—Necessary Fiction
“Reading these stories is a deeply participatory experience. Layden’s storytelling invites us to be witnesses rather than mere observers. Indeed, it’s easy to forget that we are reading and find ourselves living with the characters. . . . They become people we once knew who help us construct our own selves by highlighting the beauty and treachery of the endeavor.”
—Kathryn Ludwig, Eugene and Marilyn Glick Indiana Authors Awards and Indiana Humanities
Table of Contents
CONTENTS
Imagine Your Life Like This
Hysterectomy
Resuscitation
I’m Not Who You Think I Am
Miller Miller
Locations without Maps
Where Light Can’t Reach
In Search Of
White Hands
Paternity Test
Nothing and Nobody
Acknowledgments
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Larger images
April 2023
LC: 2022028895 PS
168 pp. 5.5 x 8.5
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