additional praise for Why Did I Ever
“Mary Robison, almost as an afterthought, has created a novel that speaks volumes about life in Los Angeles: its stopping and starting, its rushing and emoting, its whimsy and its suspicious, subversive humor.”
—Los Angeles Times Book Review
“The author, who is known as a minimalist, here creates a narrative out of fragmented paragraphs, and the book works best when she strips Money’s most explicit fears away. A simple sentence fragment—‘Canoe, moon, ukelele’—seems a close to perfect expression of lost beauty.”
—The New Yorker
“Robison’s characters are vivid, colorful, and likable, and their story is absorbing. Her humorous presentation does not cheapen the tragic content of her novel but realistically portrays one method of survival. Highly recommended for all public and academic fiction collections.”
—Library Journal
“Robison’s incandescent soliloquy on the absurdity of existence hones fiction to a new and exhilarating measure of sharpness.”
—donna seaman, Booklist
“[A] tour de force of minimalist yet mind-expanding prose . . . [Robison] makes you think—hard—about life’s unavoidable travails, while making it impossible for you to suppress a smile.”
—lisa shea, Elle
“What makes Money memorable, and Mary Robison essential, is that her fundamental bearings are the right ones. Love and compassion are her nature, and they suffuse the page whenever she is talking about her children, even the exasperating daughter.”
—richard dyer, The Boston Globe
“Why Did I Ever is a rarity: an experimental novel that’s both engaging and wholly successful.”
—Time Out New York
“Robison . . . possesses a precocious alertness to the incongruities of life . . . At the center is a disciplined and clear-headed novel full of humor and an occasional glimmer of optimism.”
—rob stout, The Charlotte Observer
“I wish to live in [Money’s] mind for a while because its perilously funny pratfalls make me want to laugh so badly that I cannot laugh at all.”
—molly mcquade, Newsday
“It is a rare novel that can manage to convey the coexistence of tragedy and pleasure so immediately without lessening the reader’s enjoyment of either.”
—The New Leader
“Mary Robison has done for the Hollywood culture of our time what Joan Didion did thirty years ago. Spare and ruthless, precisely chiseled, Why Did I Ever is the Play It As It Lays of the twenty-first century.”
—madison smartt bell, author of All Souls’ Rising
“Mary Robison’s stunned and plunging characters are the truth. This is pure, grim poetry.”
—barry hannah, author of High Lonesome
“Deeply strange, hilarious, heartbreaking, and just stupidly great . . . Robison is something approaching brilliant, and Why Did I Ever is hard-bound proof.”
—darcy cosper, Hartford Courant
also by mary robison
Days
Oh!
An Amateur’s Guide to the Night
Believe Them
Subtraction
Tell Me
One D.O.A., One on the Way
Why Did I Ever
Copyright © 2001 by Mary Robison
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events is unintended and entirely coincidental.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Robison, Mary, author.
Title: Why did I ever : a novel / Mary Robison.
Description: Berkeley, CA : Counterpoint Press, [2018]
Identifiers: LCCN 2017037859 | ISBN 9781619029644
Subjects: LCSH: Middle-aged women—Fiction. | Psychological
fiction.
Classification: LCC PS3568.O317 W49 2018 | DDC 813/.54—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017037859
Jacket designed by Jenny Carrow
Book designed by Wah-Ming Chang
COUNTERPOINT
2560 Ninth Street, Suite 318
Berkeley, CA 94710
www.counterpointpress.com
Printed in the United States of America
Distributed by Publishers Group West
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
for my daughters
my sisters,
my mother,
and for Gray
Chapter One
1
I have a dream of working a combination lock that is engraved on its back with the combination. Left 85, right 12, left 66. “Well shit, man,” I say in the dream.
2
Hollis and I have killed this whole Saturday together. We’ve watched all fourteen hours of the PBS series The Civil War.
Now that it’s over he turns to me and says, “That was good.”
Buy Me Something
I end up at Appletree—the grocery—in the dead of the night. I’m not going to last long shopping, though, because this song was bad enough when what’s-her-name sang it. And who are all these people at four a.m.? I’m making a new rule: No one is to touch me. Unless and until I feel different about things. Then, I’ll call off the rule.
4
Three ex-husbands or whoever they were.
I’m sure they have their opinions.
I would say to them, “Peace, our timing was bad, the light was ugly, things didn’t work out.” I’d say, “Although you certainly were doing your all, now weren’t you.”
I would say, “Drink!”
5
Hollis is not my ex-anything and not my boyfriend. He’s my friend. Maybe not the best friend I have in the world. He is, however, the only.
6
Daughter Mev confides in me. She says that at the Methadone clinic whenever a urine sample is required, she presents a sample of the soft drink Mellow Yellow.
“You won’t get caught,” I tell her.
She