Sara Lippman

Pictures of You: Sara Lippmann

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“My Compliance,” by Sara Lippmann

That summer, we went to The Sagamore in Lake George. It was the first and only time my family, paternal grandparents, uncle, aunt, and cousin, took a vacation together outside of a mandatory, claustrophobic Passover hotel. Mostly, we saw each other on High Holidays. My father had a fraught relationship with his younger brother; my mother didn’t click with her in-laws, who shrank from the word “lobster” as if it were cancer while she couldn’t get enough. But there we were.

Here I am: on the left beside my first cousin. There is no date on the back of the photograph. I’m guessing August 1979. August 1980.Fullscreen capture 352015 82925 AM

35 years. How reliable is my memory, how good? A few isolated details break through the fog, but questions loom. New information passed along later has penetrated my consciousness, become subsumed as fact. Secrets persist. Continue reading →

[REVIEW] Doll Palace by Sara Lippman

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Doll Palace

 

 

Dock Street Press

 

Review by Jody Hobbs Hesler

 

 

Every story in Sara Lippmann’s debut collection, Doll Palace, is a finely crafted, stark distillation of a different kind of loss, loneliness, or alienation. A motley of bleak quests for happiness in a world of irony, desolation, and shabbiness, the collection features the seedy-carney side of beach towns, broken relationships, families reckoning with their babies’ complicated and heartbreaking illnesses, a father-daughter knife throwing team, and more.

With such weighty and often off-beat topics, it’s no surprise that the tone of the collection swerves toward the melancholic at times. The story that left me with the most cheer was “Houseboy,” narrated by an immigrant working for a ridiculously wealthy man. The “rock-n-roll hootchie koo summer” he yearns to experience in the U.S. contrasts with the bitterness of what he’s left behind, leaving the character to conclude in his broken English, “The whole world is cry.” Still, the character’s humor and sweetness left me with humble hopes of better things for him. Continue reading →