Gwen E. Kirby’s Shit Cassandra Saw is a collection of narratives built on fantasy and reality. Kirby deflates everyday absurd oppressions by surfacing prescient cultural insights in absurdist plots. Much like placing a whoopie cushion under the bum of a politician, Kirby takes the gas out of societal absurdities—most notably, sexism—and fuels the tank that empowers those impacted. But where to shelve Shit Cassandra Saw, and why, has given me pause.

Beyond organizing my books by genre (nonfiction; memoir; fiction; guides to hikes that lead me to hot springs), I am no librarian. I have no business allowing the name “John Dewey” to form in my mouth, and I have, on more than one occasion, referred to the fruits of his labor as the “Dewey Decibel System.” Suffice it to say, I am loudly aware of what I don’t know about genre, and reading Gwen E. Kirby’s Shit Cassandra Saw sent my already noisy trepidations about categories further into question.

Shit Cassandra Saw is technically a book of short stories. While this is compatible with the “F I C T I O N” label typed in capital 6-point Helvetica to the left of the barcode, the classification stirred me. I related to “Midwestern Girl Is Tired of Appearing in Your Short Stories,” a critique of the chronic depersonalization of women from the Midwest (Kirby does this via repeated emphasis of the Midwestern Girl’s “ample breasts.”) I relate to a tertiary character: “the Portland girl.” The girl that gets “kissed with enthusiasm and abandon,” but who is forever reduced to damage and tattoos. I’ve lived this story before, and I wonder if Kirby excavated these experiences from her own life. I am looking for the nonfiction in Kirby’s fiction, and finding it in myself.

Kirby’s stories juxtapose the ordinary with the absurd elements of womanhood. For that reason, and because the back cover is an invitation addressed to readers identifying with Margaret Atwood and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, I read Shit Cassandra Saw like a book of personal essays. I am a woman on the Atwood-Buffy spectrum. I live in society. I can feel my world slowly collapsing around me. I sport oversized canines. I am a white-assumed, cishet-assumed, middle-class woman. I am assumed by society to be white and straight. I felt like she was speaking to me, telling me about her life, and my life, and non-fictively, damnit.

For folks who do not look or think or experience the world like Sarah Michelle Geller and Margaret Atwood, some of these pieces may ring closer to fiction. Throughout this review, I’ve interspersed vignettes which summarize stories from the book, with the goal to highlight (but not spoil) plot elements that amplify nonfictional sexism and position them relative to their in-text fictional categorization. You may be thinking: "These stories don’t align with my life experience one bit, author-of-this-review-whose-name-I-cannot-remember!" and to that, I say: Welcome.

Boudicca, Mighty Queen of the Britains, Contact Hitter and Utility Outfielder, AD I

A dose of Welsh history and baseball positions are introduced in tandem, as well as the subtle ways women play at war and thus, sport. Boudicca plays for the glory of the team and gets done what must be done. She “hit[s] a single but with a man on third [so] he’d get in nice and easy, wouldn’t even have to slide, [because] that’s the best kind of battle, when you get them before they even know to raise their weapons.” An homage to women’s silent war.

Monique Laban eloquently dubbed Shit Cassandra Saw as “transhistorical absurdism.” The description helps me stick a big toe into the tepid nonfiction bath that frames many stories in the book. Laban’s phrase creates space for the very real historical characters in Kirby’s essays—including Boudicca, Nakano Takeko, Mary Read, and others—to enact their stories with reference to the sexist problems of today. Kirby tells their stories (and hers and mine) in the frameworks of their deaths and triumphs, so much so that I imagine Kirby as Boudicca stepping up to bat at a baseball diamond. I imagine Kirby buried at the base of a pine tree, her sister Claire, to whom the book is dedicated, draped over Kirby’s grave in mourning, much like Yūko in “Nakano Takeko Is Fatally Shot, Japan, 1868.”

Jerry’s Crab Shack: One Star

One sexually frustrated male reviews his experience with the autonomous and nonpandering service staff at Jerry’s Crab Shack. Gary, the reviewer, also inadvertently reviews his wife, Janet. Women’s bodies are so inextricably tied to men’s expectations of the world around them that not even a crab restaurant can be reviewed without mention of the curves of the women who shared the experience. Description of waitress in too-tight bodice included.

Alongside historical woman figures, Kirby uses mediums such as how-to guides and reviews (“Jerry’s Crab Shack: One Star,” and “How to Retile Your Bathroom in Six Easy Steps!”) as non-fiction hermit crab shells to write within. Hermit crab mediums permit the writer to confront a difficult subject with clemency. These familiar mediums cocoon rather than deluge each chrysalis, and foster the fictive elements to vitality in the safety of their shell. Sensitive topics such as fertility struggles, consumerism, and fear of men blossom in Kirby’s curated contexts, distant from women’s daily lives. Yet, despite floating in raging seas or ordering from a large-bosomed waitress at Joe’s Crab Shack, by the end of each one of her essays, I’m hit with the feeling of having welled up this exact pool of emotions before.

The Best and Only Whore of Cwm Hyfryd, Patagonia, 1886

A woman has cornered her market in Cwm Hyfryd, Patagonia as the sole provider of paid sex and company to the men of the town. The whore, seamstress, surgeon (a woman of many talents, really) expresses the desire to exist, unencumbered, as she wants. Whoring is the only career that permits this without the burden of greater expectation.

Sound familiar?

Or, perhaps it does not.

Womanhood comprises a gradation of interstitial “others,” and sharing the “other” category, of course, does not imply a categorical universality. Rather, the tribulations of womanhood in Kirby’s work are an invitation to explore who feels included in her account of womanhood, in what ways, and why.

Carmen Maria Machado’s Her Body and Other Parties also asks us to consider the endured violence of being a woman without telling us precisely what that means. In “The Husband Stitch,” a story inspired by Alvin Schwartz’s “The Girl with the Green Ribbon” from Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, Machado explores the ranges of autonomy in a heteronormative relationship bound to a patriarchal system. Her macabre, Kafkaesque interludes illustrate how the bravery of autonomous women is often met with harm:

“There is a story to tell, about a girl dared by her peers to venture to a local graveyard after dark… ‘Life is too short to be afraid of nothing,’ she said, ‘and I will show you.’...As it turns out, being right was [her]…worst mistake.”

Here, the platitude used by the dared girl to illustrate her bravery indicates that the worst might become of her—not because going into a graveyard is inherently dangerous, but because women are frequently punished for bravery. Kirby does similar work in “First Woman Hanged for Witchcraft” and others.

Machado and Kirby depart in their representation of queer, woman-identifying characters. In Kirby’s “Mary Read is a Crossdressing Pirate,” we meet Mary, the crossdressing pirate who takes up sexual relationships with both men and women and who is with child at the time of her murder. There are also hints of queer love and affection in the final act of “Marcy Breaks Up With Herself,” as a young cocktail waitress processes a breakup with the help of a very supportive woman friend: “I don’t ever want to speak again. 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.”

Machado’s approach to queer love is outspoken and rife with grit. In her piece “Inventory,” a woman details her sexual experiences with women and men with fierce vulnerability as the country enters into an epidemic-turned-pandemic. Her raw accounts surface a queer love that’s more than a subtle suggestion embedded in absurdist housing: “She wanted cock and I obliged. Afterward, she traced the indents in my skin from the harness, and confessed to me that no one was having any luck developing a vaccine.” This is just one of many examples of where Machado shows us that queer love can be the main affair—no carapace required. For Kirby, the experiences of women under patriarchy is more central than the experiences of intimacy that women have despite it.

A Few Normal Things That Happen A Lot

Women respond to normal situations that aren’t actually normal at all but are products of an unequal power structure in society and fetishization of their gender. They do so with the mien endowed by a pandemic-style experiment, which grants them cockroach-like features such as fangs, antennae, lasers for eyes, and presumably, the ability to hold one’s breath and wait for the world to change. Just enough protection to leverage the respect they deserve.

Hermit crabs thrive in mild water temperatures of up to eighty degrees Fahrenheit. Eighty degrees is hardly considered hot water, and the hermit crab essay is not considered fiction. Storing your thoughts and feelings in an exoskeleton doesn’t make them imaginary. It protects you from them. To consider them fictional plunges us into the coldest of raging waters yet: a true acknowledgment that a woman’s thoughts, in existence as her own, are still not safe.

It’s this concept of safety that prompted my use of “essays” to describe Kirby’s short stories. Kirby processes difficult experiences on the page in relatable mediums and amplifies quotidian moments into the extraordinary. But which of these amplifications are based in fact? Which are based in fiction? And for whom? When lived reality is tainted by oppression that could and should be fictitious, what work does distinguishing between “true” and “false” do in narrative?

Another question: Why give power back to the binaries that validate lived experience with true or false division?

Here Preached His Last

An affair between colleagues ambles sideways as George Whitfield, a cleric to the Evangelical church, bears witness to the everyday life of one stressed-out woman. Never mind that she’s home with her daughter all the time and works a full-time job. Never mind that her husband is away and her affair with the physics teacher required two bodies of mass. Never mind forgiveness or grace for the tired and weakened; she is a whore, though George never makes clear if it’s because she’s a woman alone in the world or because she desired sex at all. We learn from our narrator that numbness is both the cause and the effect of her behavior: “As if scars are where we’re most vulnerable and not the thickened skin where we feel the least.”

That may be why Kirby’s work is so successful. She anchors us in her text with banal materialities (historical events, reviews, lost luggage) that magnify the absurdity of reality. Each piece connects the reader to many shared experiences of womanhood, especially those that make us feel not-so-at-home in the world we live in. “The air does not hold her up, though it embraces her all the same.” And womanhood is, like Kirby’s stories, an experience that defies definition and confinement.

If you find this prescription is for you, then you will need a few copies of Kirby’s book of stories; one for each genre in your personal collection. It can live happily in both of my prose genre groupings, excluding, of course, the hikes to the hot springs section—I hide one there too, though, in case I have visitors with sticky fingers and good taste.