In “Here Preached His Last,” Kirby approaches another unhappy marriage and flawed narrator and arrives at a refreshing place. A young mother encounters a preacher’s ghost who tries to shame her for her infidelity. He calls her a sinner, again and again. But over time, she comes to embrace this ghost’s unrelenting whispers of “whore.” Yes, she thinks, if only she could go back to that time when she wasn’t accountable to anyone about what she did with her body. Not to her husband, not to her lover, not to her child, not to her community. “Yes, I’m here, I’m here, a body, just a body, and it’s not promised to anyone, it’s mine, only mine…” Her story isn’t about “repentance,” as the ghost preacher hopes, or her swiftly approaching public shaming, or even her decaying marriage. It’s about how all her social contracts have put autonomy beyond her reach.
Kirby’s women resist stereotypes, social mores, and even the demands of narrative. I thoroughly enjoyed “Midwestern Girl Is Tired of Appearing in Your Short Stories.” It’s a fun criticism of the tired writers’ workshop piece in which a male protagonist— here, a thinly-veiled stand-in for the male writer—seeks self- actualization at the expense of a stock female character. Kirby’s clever tale follows Midwestern Girl, a young woman who comes to the big city—New York, of course—where “your protagonist” decides she must be his object of casual interest, his anecdote, his innocent symbol. She has no backstory beyond coming from a land of “cheese curds” and “deep snows”; she has “ample breasts.” She appears in various iterations in different scenarios, different settings, different drafts of the same ol’ story as “you” the author repeatedly fail to exploit her presence for your protagonist’s growth. Midwestern Girl resists being a prop. Better yet, she doesn’t even need this story. “[S]he is not waiting for a moment of epiphany.”
Kirby’s short stories celebrate multi-layered, perfectly human women—Cassandra, Marcy, Midwestern Girl, the Mt. Adams and Mt. Vista teams, Mary Read. Her collection shines most brightly when she’s adding to that pantheon of women who have done the messy work of living as themselves. As I read Shit Cassandra Saw, I found myself revisiting difficult conversations I’ve had with other women recovering from abusive experiences—in subways, in schools, in our own homes—and how important it was for our survival to rally our humor, rage, and self-worth. In that way, Kirby’s work felt like the truth. Freedom won’t be found solely in being oneself, but thriving as a complicated, imperfect woman is still a victory. In “Marcy Breaks Up with Herself,” Marcy doesn’t change necessarily. She finds someone—another woman—willing to see her as she is: “I want her to keep looking at me exactly like this: calm and wild and like she sees exactly who I am, every hidden place. I want her to look at me, to be my eyes, and to never, never stop.”