Grab the Lapels

She Throws Herself Forward to Stop the Fall by Dave Newman

Dave Newman is a favorite small-press author of mine. He lives and works in Pittsburg, Pennsylvania, which is relevant to his writing. His novels, from what I remember, always take place in Pittsburg, a city known for it’s factories and steel industry. Newman’s working-class characters try to advance themselves through higher education to avoid jobs that destroy your body, but rarely avoid hard labor entirely, and typically become a cog in the higher ed machine anyway.

In his new collection, She Throws Herself Forward to Stop the Fall, Newman presents mostly female antagonists over age thirty who are trying to get through school. Whether it’s the community college or local satellite campus for a bigger university, no one is a traditional student at a four-year institution living in dorms, experiencing Greek life, or tailgating before the home game.

Instead, they must choose whether they leave work at the fast food restaurant to make an evening class on time when their manager dictates they to stay. These women navigate relationships with men who may have a secure job and support their educations, but have a coke habit or seem too well-established to be sincere. Newman mixes a lack of self-esteem with the determination to thrive.

As someone who taught at a community college, Newman’s characters were familiar to me. Adjunct professor pay, which is what most people who teach at a community college get, is barely enough to cover your gas money. We do it because we love it, and we care about our students, little scrappy learners that they are. In one story, Newman contrasts an adjunct English instructor with a full-time professor (rare!) who teaches his own books in his poetry class. Clearly, the author is familiar with community colleges, and his experience elevates the stories by giving them a frightening dose of reality, including the adjunct not having money for tampons, let alone rent.

Exhaustion is another theme that runs through the stories. Whether a character can juggle school and work and relationships (be they dating, needy parents, or petty coworkers), the result is at least one area suffers. Sheer exhaustion doesn’t matter because characters “must” completed X, Y, and Z, be it cleaning up trash in the parking lot and mopping the bathroom or writing a paper for class. One character reminded me deeply of myself in the past: “Louise had been napping, trying to rest between work and school, and now she felt what she always felt when she woke up: ashamed. Ashamed for resting.”

I will caution readers that the final story includes a suicide and an attempted suicide, which is a challenging way to end. I read this collection aloud to my spouse, and he was getting quite upset, asking me to flip to the end and see if the second character attempting suicide survived or not. If she did not, he didn’t want me to keep reading. Truly, Newman ends his collection on a desperate note, the desperate note of a working-class college student who doesn’t know how to navigate the financial responsibilities of academia, something I’ve also witnessed.

Books of Fall 🍂🎃🍵

  • Feeding Ghosts by Tessa Hulls
  • Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
  • Just Desserts by G.A. McKevett
  • Slewfoot by Brom
  • She Throws Herself Forward to Stop the Fall by Dave Newman
  • Submerged by Hillel Levin
  • The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories by Angela Carter
  • Notes on an Execution by Danya Kukafka
  • The West Passage by Jared Pechaček
  • Quest for the Unknown: Bizarre Phenomena by Reader’s Digest
  • The Unmothers by Leslie J. Anderson
  • Icebreaker by Hannah Grace
  • A Life in Letters by Zora Neale Hurston
  • Ask Elizabeth: Real Answers to Everything You Secretly Wanted to Ask about Love, Friends, Your Body — and Life in General by Elizabeth Berkley
  • Homing by Sherrie Flick
  • No Good Deed by Allison Brennan (#10)
  • Bitter Thirst by S.M. Reine (Preternatural Affairs #8)
  • Deaf Eyes on Interpreting, edited by Thomas H. Holcomb and David H. Smith
  • Compassion, Michigan by Raymond Luczak
  • Fat! So? by Marilyn Wann
  • Syd Arthur by Ellen Frankel

19 comments

  1. Reading this review really struck me with the realization that I don’t think I’ve ever heard of a book like this, fiction or non-fiction, that focuses on this really difficult phase of life, a phase that admittedly I have never gone through, but is so common for so many folks. I can relate to the feeling of shame for napping (I have so much to do, it feels like) but these are things I want to do, not must do. It’s a fantastic cover too.

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    • These characters all felt familiar to me because I used to be the adjunct who taught at a community college. It’s really weird to have a bunch of dual-enrolled high school students sitting in a classroom with people in their thirties just trying to make life work, just trying to start all over again. Would you like me to send my copy to you?

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      • That would feel weird to have students in both, at such different stages of their life. I bet the class discussions were fruitful though!

        That’s a very kind offer, but my book shelves are overflowing right now! Reading other bloggers have inspired me to seek out books on my own more and more, rather than just waiting to see what the publishers send me. The only downside is my bookshelves are now out of control, as I know you can relate!!!

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        • Sometimes it felt like there was a lot of tension between the older and younger students. The older students had a lot of life experience, and the younger students had more academic experience. Sometimes it felt like the older students were trying to tell the younger students all the things that they just didn’t know because they’re young, which comes off as rude. Other times, the younger students can come off as incredibly immature and thoughtless. It all depends. Sometimes they vibe together, but typically they would be pretty separated.

          No problem about the book. I’ll share it with someone else 🙂

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  3. You won’t be surprised to hear that I love the sound of this. I have an online Bookgroup friend who is – actually maybe she has just retired – a teacher at a community college in Tennessee or North Carolina (I’ve forgotten – we actually met up in Asheville many years ago.) I heard many stories, positive and negative over the years but not so much about the students’ lives. We don’t really have Community Colleges here. We do have something called Colleges of Technical and Further Education which are mostly vocationally focused.

    Anyhow this sounds a bit like modern social realism and I like such stories because – I’m going to say it – they feel important. I guess the fact that he ended up with the story you describe suggests that he wanted to leave readers a strong message about the toughness of the situation these people find themselves in?

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    • I’m guessing a lot of these stories are based on the authors own feeling or experiences. I actually liked his novel East Pittsburgh Down Low better, which also has a community college professor. I think these stories are important because I have questions about the function of community colleges. Sometimes, they are launching pads to a four-year college, but those first two years cost less at the CC. Sometimes, people think they will get a better job, despite signs pointing out how the bachelor’s degree is losing respect in the working sector. Then, there are two-year degree programs like the one I was part of when I taught in the prison that do not focus on a specific subject, but teach students how to think. The classes are in philosophy, religion, rhetoric, Shakespeare, etc.

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      • Education is such a tricky, complex thing isn’t it Melanie. I could say so much in response to this – more questions, more comments – but we’ll never answer them all so I’ll just say I really enjoyed these insights into your system. I really wish more people understood that the most important thing about education is teaching you HOW to think and HOW to learn.

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  4. We don’t really have the community college model here – I think that’s part of what the old polytechnics used to do but they were mostly turned into mainstream universities back in the 90s. In a way it’s a shame because it does sound like a more accessible route into higher education than we have here, although we have foundation degrees and access courses run out of a lot of universities. It is probably more sustainable for the staff, but harder for the students to access I think.

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    • Sue was just saying the same thing about not having community colleges in Australia, or if it is a two-year school, it’s a vocational program. I think that might be how a lot of them started, but now you can get an associate’s in a variety of subjects, like an associate of arts degree. The CC where I used to teach was originally a vocational school that I heard the local factories put a lot of money into to develop the trades, but then it switch over and primarily served dual-enrolled high school kids, which I loathed.

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  5. I agree with Lou about the loss of “community colleges” – CAEs or colleges of advanced education in Australia – which were all made into universities in the 1980s and 90s. Though all universities in Aust seem to have lost their way, now paying their vice chancellors million dollar salaries to chase full-fee-paying overseas students while shedding lecturers and tutors just as quickly as they can get away with.

    I liked the one one Dave Newman I read, and hopefully will come across another. But not short stories with women protagonists.

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  6. This sounds interesting because, as others have pointed out, this type of academia isn’t often focused on in literature. I think of when Peter went back to school to do his masters and how much pressure that added to our household but it also wasn’t the same as this at all because he already had a career and a stability that it sounds like these characters are seeking. I wonder why the author chose to focus on female characters?

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    • I also wondered why the author survived on women as all his novels are about men. It didn’t really bother me; largely, it changed their home responsibilities, such as when one character’s mom needs support. Daughters typically care for mothers.

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