Grab the Lapels

How to Save a Misfit by Ellen Cassidy

Ellen Cassidy is a Michigan author. The book How to Save a Misfit contains six longer stories — not novellas, and not short stories. I read all 116 pages in one day because Cassidy’s stories were a world into which I could easily exist and settle.

The first story earned my respect and kept me reading. A woman in her 60s who has never married finds yoga and its benefits. In the class is a rather rank man who never wears a shirt, and she seems incapable of getting over it. Instead, she is drawn to another man, about her age, and they agree to go out for Bloody Marys after class. The pair immediately establish this is not a date, this is the start of a friendship. And that’s exactly how the story proceeds. It was completely refreshing reading both platonic intimacy between a man and woman and older characters who aren’t stereotyped.

The six long stories are connected by place, particularly a dive bar called Suki’s. None of the connections feel forced, though, as sometimes happens with books marketed as interconnected short story collections. Sometimes, I couldn’t remember if I’d met the main character as a secondary or tertiary character in a previous story; however, the individual gradually came to me, and I would think, “Oh, year, this is so-and-so from the other story.” I enjoyed that, like running into someone at the store and wondering if you know them from work, school, the neighborhood, etc. How to Save a Misfit surely benefits from a reread because you could remember the basic plots and see the connections more clearly second time around.

One thing I’ve grown weary of that Cassidy avoids is stories about lower-middleclass people, typically blue-collar workers, who are written as too dark, too edgy, or they think the “real” world doesn’t get them because the “real” world has never juggled community college, factory work, addiction, and living in a mobile home. Now, I appreciate that what I just described is a reality for millions of people, yet authors frequently fail to acknowledge a modicum of happiness—maybe a pet, a plant the character takes care of, a funny coworker…just, something — that rounds out life. Cassidy writes her stories in a natural way that keeps the seams from being exposed. Instead, the reader feels like she’s just there, listening in on a conversation instead of reading a book.

books of winter 🎄❄️⛄

  • Savage Inequalities: Children in America’s Schools by Jonathan Kozol
  • Monster: A Fan’s Dilemma by Claire Deder (DNF)
  • This is Not a Book about Benedict Cumberbatch by Tabitha Carvan
  • Crafting for Sinners by Jenny Kiefer
  • Uncomfortable Conversations with a Black Man by Emmanuel Acho
  • Suggs Black Backtracks by Martha Ann Spencer (DNF)
  • Paradise Rot by Jenny Hval (DNF)
  • The Lost Girls by Allison Brennan (#11)
  • Deliverance by James Dickey
  • How to Save a Misfit by Ellen Cassidy
  • The Road to Helltown by S.M. Reine (Preternatural Affairs series #9) (finished — special review forthcoming at a later date)
  • Devil’s Call by J. Danielle Dorn
  • Jaws by Peter Benchley
  • The New York trilogy by Paul Auster
  • The Man Who Shot Out My Eye is Dead by Chanelle Benz
  • All of Me by Venise Berry
  • At Wit’s End by Erma Bombeck
  • Minding the Store: Great Literature About Business from Tolstoy to Now edited by Robert Coles and Albert LaFarge
  • Touched by Kim Kelly
  • Awakened by Laura Elliott
  • After Life by Andrew Neiderman

10 comments

  1. I’m sorry to start at I like the cover, but I do, it’s well done. I’ve lived a lot of my life in hot conditions. I was going to say I’ve never walked around without at least a singlet on, then I remembered I was a swimmer for 30 years and walked around with just tiny little bathers on (But not outside the pool!).

    Before Milly started talking to me again I tried that this is not a date we are just friends eating out, seeing a movie thing. It was not very successful. Most people expect a date to be a date.

    I like connected stories. They seem to be having a moment (a decade) in the sun. Perhaps writers are being told to put more effort into their short story collections – they’re no longer a way of getting paid for all their practice pieces.

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    • Hey, I don’t mind comments about cover art. When I took a grad class on children’s lit, we talked about cover art. It goes through phases (such as when all women’s novels were bright pink, neon green, or electric blue and had a shoe or a lipstick on the front) to books that are published for a long time and keep getting cover updates, like a novel called Weetzie Bat (which I haven’t read). I also learned that most cover art is done by someone who gets a synopsis and hasn’t read the book, which often leads to covers that don’t match the content. Right now, I’m really over the cover art you see in romance novels and women’s fiction that has that cartoony look to it. It makes all the books look juvenile, in my opinion, even when the content is serious.

      I do think most people expect a date to be a date unless they say something about their intentions. Now I’m wondering if you and Milly were clear with each other, or if one of you thought the other was trying to make it work again.

      I do like connected stories as well. I cannot stand a fiction collection in which it feels like the author has one simple idea (usually about identity) and they write that same idea over and over and over again. The characters in one story are totally replaceable with the characters in another story because they’re no different.

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  2. Now this is a book that I love the sound of Melanie. That first story sounds excellent, though I wouldn’t have the Bloody Mary. Rather a nice crisp white wine and a good post-yoga companion sounds perfect. I also like your point about writers on working class people. I will say that one of Australia’s classic working class novels, Harp in the South by Ruth Park sticks in my mind because of the warmth of the characters. What I always think about is what a tough life theirs is but how much they care about each other, which provides that modicum of happiness you are talking about.

    Re Bill’s point, I didn’t really look at the cover because it looked dark and complicated and that didn’t grab my attention.

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    • I appreciate that the cover looks like (and probably is) actual artwork. I know many covers are more like clip art. I actually read a reviewer copy years ago that had an identical cover to another book, which (if I remember correctly) the publisher had forgotten they’d previously used.

      This morning I watched a news story about at tiny town that helped a homeless man. One woman calculated out how much gas she needed to get to work that day and how far it was to the homeless man just so she could give him something. To me, that is more realistic of small towns that the “edgy” stuff.

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      • That’s a lovely story about kindness Melanie. Thanks for sharing.

        We have some great book designers here – as I’m sure you do too – and I can usually tell when they’ve had a hand in a cover. It’s a real skill that not all publishers pay enough attention to.

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  3. This sounds like a lovely little read. And I know what you mean about ‘running’ into familiar characters in interconnected stories. It’s nice to be a bit familiar with them, but not in an obvious way. I can’t imagine that’s easy to write from the author’s perspective, so I always appreciate it when I come across it.

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