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A review by millennial_dandy
Here Until August: Stories by Josephine Rowe
4.0
3.5 rounded up to 4
"How sinister a spoon looks, lying all alone on a windowsill."
If you're looking for a bit of 'summertime sadness', this is the short story collection for you. Indeed, even the stories that take place in the wintertime ooze with the breezy melancholy Lana seemed to be referring to.
If asked to summarize what happens in any given story, they could all be summed up thusly: 'nothing really happens other than life whooshing around the protagonist, but it was sad.'
These are stories about loss, but not the losing parts, not the dramatic crying on the kitchen floor at 3am parts, but the quiet parts of mourning and grief and uncertainty and loneliness where it's a beautiful day with a perfect breeze and you sit out on the porch sipping lemonade and feeling depressed. Maybe about something specific, maybe not.
This type of whimsical, poetic, and at the same time incredibly mundane unhappiness perfectly captures the brand of ennui that characterizes the Millennial generation.
It was all fun and games back in 2013 when we sent each other memes of manic smiles and captions like 'I'm so fucking depressed haha' or posting pictures of $5 bath bombs on Facebook with the caption 'self care lol' with the subtext: 'please god help me I'm so sad all the time and the brief bump of dopamine I got when I bought this is the only thing keeping me going.'
I vividly remember the discourse about the dangers of romanticizing depression and manic self care even as we all felt ourselves getting crushed under capitalism, staring down the twin barrels of climate change and social instability.
And now, ten years later, those anxious young adults are becoming 'real' adults and nothing feels like it's any better and we've resigned ourselves to a lifetime of mourning the bright future that was never there for us. Even so, even if anxiety feels as innate a part of you as your left pinky toe, at least if you look out for it something funny might happen at the local cafe or the check-out line at the grocery store, or maybe you'll go for a walk in the woods and come upon someone your age just screaming at the clouds. Either way, something for the group chat.
All this to say, to the average, irony-poisoned, anxiety-riddled Boomer Zoomer/fetus Millennial, 'Here Until August' feels like home.
Stories like 'Real Life', 'The Once-Drowned Man' and 'Chavez' focus on life's alltägliche occurrences but with a quirky twist: playing a game with your sort-of lover, trying to guess if the couple downstairs is fighting or having sex, a passenger in your taxi who claims to have been involved in obscure film projects and needs a lift four hours north to the Canadian border, dogs with names like 'Mingus' and 'Heisenberg' being told by bougie owners to stay out of the trash.
Josephine Rowe is obviously someone who pays attention when she's out and about and sits at Starbucks without headphones in so she can eavesdrop on the couple at the table next to her, because every one of the stories in this collection feel like small moments captured on glass slides, and she's just helping you look through the microscope. 'See,' she seems to be saying, 'that grain of sand contains multitudes -- doesn't that make you feel alive? But also very, very sad?'
I think you get the idea.
Not every meditation on mourning or yearning will resonate with every person, of course. I can feel for the woman who lost her baby, but that's not a grief I'll ever feel, so it's less meaningful to me than stories about relationships where the couple only stays together because loneliness would be worse, or where the protagonist does summersaults just to avoid having to talk to her neighbors or fellow dog-walkers.
It's a subjective thing, but if you're in the right age group and you're wanting to lean into a wistful fugue state, this is the book for you. Keep your best underlining pen at the ready.
And yes, I took a picture of the cover against summer flowers for Instagram and posted it while I sipped on an oat-milk latte (though I did skip out on the avocado toast) because sometimes that self-indulgent, summertime sadness aesthetic is what you need. And let's be real: whoever designed that cover knew what they were doing.
Josephine gets it.
And hey, if you're looking for these vibes elsewhere, 'Love in the Big City' by Sang Young Park is also a great place to find them.
"How sinister a spoon looks, lying all alone on a windowsill."
If you're looking for a bit of 'summertime sadness', this is the short story collection for you. Indeed, even the stories that take place in the wintertime ooze with the breezy melancholy Lana seemed to be referring to.
If asked to summarize what happens in any given story, they could all be summed up thusly: 'nothing really happens other than life whooshing around the protagonist, but it was sad.'
These are stories about loss, but not the losing parts, not the dramatic crying on the kitchen floor at 3am parts, but the quiet parts of mourning and grief and uncertainty and loneliness where it's a beautiful day with a perfect breeze and you sit out on the porch sipping lemonade and feeling depressed. Maybe about something specific, maybe not.
This type of whimsical, poetic, and at the same time incredibly mundane unhappiness perfectly captures the brand of ennui that characterizes the Millennial generation.
It was all fun and games back in 2013 when we sent each other memes of manic smiles and captions like 'I'm so fucking depressed haha' or posting pictures of $5 bath bombs on Facebook with the caption 'self care lol' with the subtext: 'please god help me I'm so sad all the time and the brief bump of dopamine I got when I bought this is the only thing keeping me going.'
I vividly remember the discourse about the dangers of romanticizing depression and manic self care even as we all felt ourselves getting crushed under capitalism, staring down the twin barrels of climate change and social instability.
And now, ten years later, those anxious young adults are becoming 'real' adults and nothing feels like it's any better and we've resigned ourselves to a lifetime of mourning the bright future that was never there for us. Even so, even if anxiety feels as innate a part of you as your left pinky toe, at least if you look out for it something funny might happen at the local cafe or the check-out line at the grocery store, or maybe you'll go for a walk in the woods and come upon someone your age just screaming at the clouds. Either way, something for the group chat.
All this to say, to the average, irony-poisoned, anxiety-riddled Boomer Zoomer/fetus Millennial, 'Here Until August' feels like home.
Stories like 'Real Life', 'The Once-Drowned Man' and 'Chavez' focus on life's alltägliche occurrences but with a quirky twist: playing a game with your sort-of lover, trying to guess if the couple downstairs is fighting or having sex, a passenger in your taxi who claims to have been involved in obscure film projects and needs a lift four hours north to the Canadian border, dogs with names like 'Mingus' and 'Heisenberg' being told by bougie owners to stay out of the trash.
Josephine Rowe is obviously someone who pays attention when she's out and about and sits at Starbucks without headphones in so she can eavesdrop on the couple at the table next to her, because every one of the stories in this collection feel like small moments captured on glass slides, and she's just helping you look through the microscope. 'See,' she seems to be saying, 'that grain of sand contains multitudes -- doesn't that make you feel alive? But also very, very sad?'
I think you get the idea.
Not every meditation on mourning or yearning will resonate with every person, of course. I can feel for the woman who lost her baby, but that's not a grief I'll ever feel, so it's less meaningful to me than stories about relationships where the couple only stays together because loneliness would be worse, or where the protagonist does summersaults just to avoid having to talk to her neighbors or fellow dog-walkers.
It's a subjective thing, but if you're in the right age group and you're wanting to lean into a wistful fugue state, this is the book for you. Keep your best underlining pen at the ready.
And yes, I took a picture of the cover against summer flowers for Instagram and posted it while I sipped on an oat-milk latte (though I did skip out on the avocado toast) because sometimes that self-indulgent, summertime sadness aesthetic is what you need. And let's be real: whoever designed that cover knew what they were doing.
Josephine gets it.
And hey, if you're looking for these vibes elsewhere, 'Love in the Big City' by Sang Young Park is also a great place to find them.