Whatever Used to Grow Around Here

In her debut collection of short fiction, Whatever Used To Grow Around Here, Lauren Belski lovingly charts the unmapped and ever-shifting borderland between adolescence and adulthood in contemporary America. For the most part, her characters are twenty-somethings who long not so much for the innocence of youth but a sense of hope and optimism lost after repeated brushes with the daunting ambiguities and contradictions that constitute the so-called “real-world.” In some ways, the biggest question facing many of these young adults who teeter precariously somewhere between the Gen-X and Gen-Y labels is that of what to wear: New sundresses, shirts, and skirts from Banana Republic, Hollister, and Macy’s, all designed to flatter and look great in job interviews, cocktail parties, and other occasions for discomfort that mark the passage into adulthood, or the comfortable thrift-store rags of youth that cost three dollars and still smell of the perfume worn by their former owners? The over-sized Burberry coat your dad gave you, hoping perhaps, you’d one day grow into it? The heavy sweater and matching gloves the girl you just met promises to knit for you if only you’ll come in out of the cold? The loose-fitting dress you wore on your first day of work only to realize, after dozens of late nights and countless boxes of salty Szechuan takeout, that it’s suddenly the tightest thing you own? As anyone who’s passed through the region of uncertainty explored throughout Whatever Used To Grow Around Here can attest, these aren’t easy questions to answer, and while it was TS Eliot who talked about preparing a face to meet the faces you will meet, it’s Belski who dares to ask what you’ll wear once you’ve finished primping. The key to being an adult, it turns out, is to dress the part and keep on faking it until the act comes naturally, to drive in ever-widening circles around the edges of adulthood until the terrain starts to look familiar, to live life, to make mistakes, to get it all wrong yet still have the confidence, however misguided, that one day you’ll get it all right.