In Fact Books
350 pages, $15.95

Review by Kate Schapira

As a reviewer, I may have come in the wrong door. I’m not from the South, and I’ve never lived there or even been there for very long. What’s more, the word “sin” puts my back up — it reminds me of ads that refer to chocolate as a “guilty pleasure.” Oh, for heaven’s sake. Just relish the damn thing.

But what if you can’t? Or what if the guilt really does make the pleasure sweeter? What if, as Dorothy Allison suggests in her introduction, it fills you with defiant pride — the lie you get everyone to believe, the truth you fling in everyone’s face?

Sin as a show, as I’ll show them, appears more than once in this collection: Chelsea Rathburn, in “The Renters”, offers aid and comfort to a couple having an extramarital affair partly to thumb her nose at her ex-husband, “so squeamish about all things sexual.” The essays’ displays of intimacy, physical glut and emotional mess, feel less like confessions than like exposures. Continue reading →