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AM/PM

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Amelia Gray

August 2009

Brian Allen Carr

Amelia Gray is not Amelia Grey. Grey writes romance blockbusters with titles like A Duke to Die For, and Gray’s debut AM/PM is anything but a blockbuster. I’m not even sure if it’s a book. It might be an indefinable thing.

Amelia Gray is not Amelia Grey. Grey writes romance blockbusters with titles like A Duke to Die For, and Gray’s debut AM/PM is anything but a blockbuster. I’m not even sure if it’s a book. It might be an indefinable thing.

A patchwork of form-rejection sized vignettes, AM/PM is billed by Featherproof Books as a flash-fiction collection that follows, “the lives of 23 characters across 120 stories.” In their promotional material, Featherproof claims that, “If anything’s going to save the characters in Amelia Gray’s debut from their troubled romances, their social improprieties, or their hands turning into claws, it’s a John Mayer concert tee.” But that’s a bit misleading. The 23 characters do need saving, but the tee only has a cameo in the vignette titled “AM:80”:

Good morning John Mayer Concert Tee! You seem to have weathered the past few days rather poorly. Your cuffs are split, you’re stained at the neck. The graceful visage of The One Who Will Play the Smooth Guitar is sullied by dirt scrub and bent into a permanent, unnatural shape.

John Mayer Tee. Our hero?

To truly understand AM/PM, you must understand how it was conceived. In Gray’s own words from her interview with Orange Alert:

AM/PM is a collection of 120 pieces ranging from vignettes to short-short stories. I wrote one in the morning and one at night every day for two months in the summer of 2007. The editing of the book didn’t include much of a selection process because most of the stories did make it through edits and into the final copy.

That’s the literary-interview equivalent of a shoulder shrug, hair flip, and a drag off a cigarette followed by the phrase, “I just wake up looking like this.” Featherproof must agree. They feed into the confident disposition. Because while every vignette in AM/PM sits lonely on the page, the head shot of Gray is postcard sized and forces the “About the Author” credits onto a page of its own.

To be fair there is some fun writing in this debut. “AM:58” for instance:

Missy had legs, and she knew how to use them. She slid them into jeans or wrapped a skirt around them. She walked with her legs to the grocery store. She used her legs to help haul everything up the stairs and into her kitchen, and she used her legs to walk back into the bedroom and back into bed. It was easy to use her legs, she thought, drifting off.

Gray also writes some pretty nice mock-self help sketches, as evidenced in “AM:72”

Are you growing mistrustful of others? Do you suspect your wife does not actually have cancer? Is every trip to the mailbox an exercise in loathing and remorse? Are your coworkers having trouble finding anything interesting to say when they talk about you behind your back? Do you deeply despise people who possess many of the same opinions and motives as your own?

But I’m not sure how this collection works as a whole. I’m not sure that there is enough time to truly establish any meaning from page to page. I’m not sure that there is enough of a thread to justify their being lumped together. Is there a story? Is there a lager fiction at play? Or is it just a multitude of jump cuts? No panoramas? No views?

I do admit that at some level it’s an intriguing ride – in the same way that Invisible Cities is structurally attractive – and I would recommend taking a gander at it. If nothing else you should hop over to Featherproof’s site for the free mini-book version of AM/PM. It includes five of the vignettes you’ll find in the full-length, which might be the perfect amount of these gems to digest at a time. You won’t get carpal tunnel of the eyeball. You won’t get to thinking, “This again,” every time you turn the excessively-white page.

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