[REVIEW] Pretend We Live Here by Genevieve Hudson

Future Tense Books, 2018

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REVIEW BY KAIT HEACOCK

As the Pacific Northwest editor for Joyland—a magazine founded on the idea that fiction is an international movement supported by local communities—I’m tasked with determining what makes PNW literature. Through Joyland, I had the pleasure of meeting Genevieve Hudson, author of the story collection Pretend We Live Here (Future Tense Books, 2018). I’ve carried the book with me through two moves, and many of its stories have stuck with me like they are my own memories of childhood heartbreak, adult heartbreak, and all the inside jokes that help you laugh through those aforementioned heartbreaks.

When I consider Pacific Northwest literature—looking beyond the physical boundaries of the Pacific Ocean and the Cascades—I search for the stylistic choices and thematic concerns that connect writers of this area. First, I must consider some of our historically iconic authors: Ken Kesey, Oregon’s merry prankster of hippie lit, and Tom Robbins, whose novels are like the West in book form, boundary-pushing pioneers of prose. What connects these authors is their playfulness, even in the face of tragic plots.

But to sum up who we are as writers that way doesn’t feel complete. There’s more, and it’s something sacred. Where our books may laugh in the face of God (Oregon and Washington are part of the “Unchurched Belt”), we do show absolute reverence for nature. Cheryl Strayed hikes the PCT to enlightenment and Lidia Yuknavitch continues to find new ways to transform bodies into oceans. Many of us may lack religion, but we have no shortage of spirituality.

Our literature exists in this intersection between the irreverent and the reverent, and that’s where I found Genevieve Hudson. She came to me by way of the short story “Too Much is Never Enough” about a young protagonist with two best friends, a boy and a girl she loves in different ways, but who are confused by or disinterested in her love. The main character first meets Catherine Elizabeth, her inseparable childhood best friend she calls Lizard until the girl’s mom stumbles in on them while they are making their vaginas “fart.” It’s a funny scene of kids innocently discovering the absurdities of having a body, but it quickly darkens when the mom, confused by the tomboyish best friend, enrolls her daughter into ballet classes and effectively ends the friendship.

Next, the girl befriends Mason, a rabble-rousing boy introduced holding a homemade bomb. “Mason looked like an angel, which was lucky for him because he acted like the devil so the two just about evened themselves out.” With Mason, she smokes stolen cigarettes and arm wrestles. As her body matures past childhood lines, she finds herself wanting to be him and to be loved by him. But instead, Mason finds Lizard, now Katie: “There was something they found in each other they could never find in me. I was not enough boy for Lizard. Not enough girl for Mason. I was something in between them.”

In between is where Genevieve’s stories live: characters in-between identities, settings in between Alabama and Amsterdam, a tone in between hilarious and heartbreaking. Her writing lives in a fluid space between a funny anecdote someone told you about their rural childhood and your third eye’s fever dream.

“Too Much is Never Enough” is not the only story of a tomboy figuring out how she fits in at the skatepark and punk shows where teens constellate in Pretend We Live Here. In “Scarecrow,” it’s Crow filming her best friend Jed and his fearless little brother on her camcorder while the boys perform daredevil stunts. In “Skatepark,” the protagonist is the only girl who skateboards besides the boys, and one of only two “12-year-olds who were brave enough to drop-in on the 12-foot half-pipe.” These stories are ripe with young girls who run from Sunday school dresses and refuse to stand on the sidelines while the boys have all the fun. Instead, they run towards their best friends’ older sisters, and they are wild with rebellion and first love. “She takes off at a slow pace for the show. It’s the kind of night with the day still in it…She stops and rips a sprig of lavender from a bush. She rubs it over her face and arms, shoves it inside her training bra.”

In many of these stories, the tomboy experiences a loss of innocence: a confusing sexual encounter she immediately regrets, following a reckless crush, watching her best friend sacrifice a piece of himself for the love of an estranged parent. These stories end with each character’s sudden jolt into adulthood. It’s as if the characters in these stories grow up and become the jaded, sarcastic, but occasionally still optimistic adults of the collection’s other stories.

The title of the collection is a line pulled from the story “Date Book,” in which the protagonist recounts a year with her long-distance girlfriend in short blurbs for each month. “By September you are another country again. The thought of you causes me to pick weeds, to put poems on the back of receipt paper. I get a package in the mail. It’s wrapped in a map of the place where you live. I fall in love with the smell of the cardboard, the image of your palms folding the top down. We meet on an island in the middle. I feed myself to you until we’re full.” The months are carefully and lovingly filled with acutely personal details, so that when January gets only the solemn entry “January,” the reader knows the end is near. “In February we go to Seattle to say goodbye. We accidentally rent a weekend apartment over a lesbian bar. We laugh all the way up the stairs.” It the end of their story, but they are pretending together. “We pretend we live here. We drink from cups. We unmake the bed.”

As the title of the collection, Pretend We Live Here sounds more like a command. It seems again to point to the in-between space this book evokes for me. There’s an implication of transience in the title, which is true for many people who come west. The Pacific Northwest, as the farthest point of the Contiguous United States, is often where people end up, particularly now as an influx of workers come here for tech jobs. Hudson is herself a transplant to Portland from Alabama, and her stories draw from all of her real-life settings. Whether the stories are set in a small town in Alabama or the queer art scene in Amsterdam, the characters within them are searching for something.

The first story in the book, “God Hospital,” and the last, “Boy Box,” both end with the protagonist being led away from a place. In each, the young girl follows an older girl, who acts as a guide, either away from or, potentially, to danger. The characters in the collection, children figuring out gender fluidity and first crushes or adults navigating complicated relationships, are seeking guides, but the guides—and Hudson—rarely take the reader to expected places.

Don’t try to pin Genevieve Hudson down. She will keep you guessing, and goddamn that’s something I adore in a writer. She has taken up the mantle of Robbins, Kesey and the other psychedelic, blue-collar poets of evergreens, mountain streams, and witty one-liners, and is queering the canon of Pacific Northwest literature.

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