A01=Megan Cummins
Addiction
American Literature
Author_Megan Cummins
Autoimmune Disease
Category=FB
Category=FYB
Chronic Illness
Drug Dealer
eq_anthologies-novellas-short-stories
eq_bestseller
eq_fiction
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_nobargain
Failed Marriage
Fiction
Grief
Guilt
Isolation
Literary Fiction
Literature
Love
New Jersey
Newark
Opioids
Overdose
Prairie Schooner Prize
Prize Winning
Relapse
Short Stories
Substance Abuse
Teenage Mistake
Product details
- ISBN 9781496222831
- Dimensions: 140 x 216mm
- Publication Date: 01 Sep 2020
- Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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Longlisted for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection
Winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction, If the Body Allows It is divided into six parts and framed by the story of Marie, a woman in her thirties living in Newark, New Jersey. Suffering from a chronic autoimmune illness, she also struggles with guilt over the overdose and death of her father, whom she feels she betrayed at the end of his life. The stories within the frame—about failed marriages, places of isolation and protection, teenage mistakes, and forging a life in the aftermath—are the stories the narrator writes after she meets and falls in love with a man whose grief mirrors her own. If the Body Allows It explores illness and its aftermath, guilt and addiction, and the relationships the characters form after they’ve lost everyone else, including themselves.
Introspective, devastating, and funny, If the Body Allows It grapples with the idea that life is always on the brink of never being the same again.
Winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction, If the Body Allows It is divided into six parts and framed by the story of Marie, a woman in her thirties living in Newark, New Jersey. Suffering from a chronic autoimmune illness, she also struggles with guilt over the overdose and death of her father, whom she feels she betrayed at the end of his life. The stories within the frame—about failed marriages, places of isolation and protection, teenage mistakes, and forging a life in the aftermath—are the stories the narrator writes after she meets and falls in love with a man whose grief mirrors her own. If the Body Allows It explores illness and its aftermath, guilt and addiction, and the relationships the characters form after they’ve lost everyone else, including themselves.
Introspective, devastating, and funny, If the Body Allows It grapples with the idea that life is always on the brink of never being the same again.
Megan Cummins is the managing editor at A Public Space and A Public Space Books. Her work has been published in Ninth Letter, One Teen Story, Guernica, and Electric Literature.
