Much like the collection’s opening short stories, the stories “Love in the Tall Grass,” “Storms,” and “Ride If You Dare,” all feature female protagonists who are fighting for autonomy over their lives, bodies, and fates, reiterating the theme of Female Agency Constrained by Domesticity and Gender Roles. In “Love in the Tall Grass,” Cordelia has chosen to live a single life, while pursuing an affair with the unnamed doctor; although Cordelia is nominally free, she finds her happiness limited by the choices of a well-off, married man who ultimately cannot prioritize her best interest. In “Storms,” Ellen becomes the victim of her mother’s mental illness after her grandmother passes away; her mother’s inability to reconcile with her loss leads to her forced hospitalization at a mental health facility. Over the course of the story, Ellen realizes that her mother is being punished for failing to cope with her grief in a typical manner; her loss inhibits her mother’s ability to uphold the gender roles prescribed to her. Finally, in “Ride If You Dare,” Roslin attempts to escape her own bitter, unfulfilling marriage when she starts seeing Guthrie; much like the happily married woman from “Antarctica,” Cordelia regards her infidelity as an act of rebellious autonomy.

In both “Love in the Tall Grass” and “Ride if You Dare,” the main characters use Sex as a Form of Self-Exploration, another of the collection’s primary themes. In both stories, the author uses symbolic imagery to deepen this thematic exploration and to reify the finite aspects of each protagonists’ experience. In “Love in the Tall Grass,” for example, Cordelia’s life on the farm is defined by images of apples, eggs, and tall grass. The apple imagery is a literary allusion to the biblical book of Genesis and the Garden of Eden. Cordelia is positioned as the proverbial “temptress,” the Eve character who draws the doctor away from his familial obligations by promising him sex and everlasting romantic bliss. The surrounding egg imagery evokes notions of fertility, while the grass imagery evokes notions of nature and life, or Mother Earth. Cordelia opens up her life to the doctor—who isn’t given a name and is thus rendered simply via this metonym—because she wants the freedom of choosing her own sexual partners and making decisions based on her own desires: “She wanted him to bang on her door in the middle of the night with his fist, to come in with a suitcase and call her by her name […] She wanted him to carry her into a strange house and leave the door wide open” (49). The image of the “strange house” with the open door evokes a sense of newness and unfamiliarity, paired with a sense of possibility and discovery—Cordelia is similarly opening herself wide, welcoming in what could be via her sexual autonomy.

The same is true of Roslin in “Ride If You Dare.” Roslin has devoted herself to her husband for 10 years, perpetually hoping that investing in him might allow her to access his complex interior, only to realize that “there was nothing in there, just a hard, empty shell” (76). With Guthrie, she is—as Guthrie says of the carnival ride—allowing “a little risk” (80) into her life. The image of her sitting in front of Guthrie as they go down the slide suggests that Roslin is leading the dynamic and making an autonomous decision to have an affair with him. The image of the hand pushing them down the slide suggests that Roslin is also letting fate and chance take over, giving in to life’s unexpected possibilities. For both her and Cordelia, sex offers the possibility of newness and self-empowerment.

With the short story “Storms,” Keegan nuances her representation of female entrapment and self-exploration via the Ellen character. Ellen’s youthful attempts to make sense of her mother’s debilitating mental illness convey the theme of the Destabilizing Nature of Loss and Grief. In this story, the recurring image of the dairy illustrates Ellen’s internal experience. The more often she retreats to the dairy, the more difficulty she is having coping with her mother’s condition. A Room meant for housing milk products, the space symbolizes maternity and lactation. Ellen goes here for an unconscious nearness with her mother. While here she also explores the dairy’s artifacts: “old books stuck together with damp, no pictures, brown maps, and some prayer books” (62), concrete family artifacts that Ellen hopes might clarify her mother’s uncanny behaviors and their implications for her own way of being in the world: “I felt that if I could understand its contents, my life would make more sense. But that never happened” (62). For this reason, Ellen starts to visit her mother at the hospital each week. The hospital becomes a replacement for the dairy—a place Ellen can go in hopes of making sense of her inexplicable circumstances. Unable to explain her mother’s mental illness via logic, Ellen starts to take “a little of what my mother has” (68), regarding her symptoms as a metaphoric vaccination against her own future illness. Just as Ellen’s mother is so destabilized by her own mother’s death that she is hospitalized, Ellen fears that losing her mother will result in the same fate; as women, their emotional expressions have severe consequences. The story uses subtext to explore historical notions of “hysteria” in women. Because Ellen’s mother is grieving, her husband deems her “insane” and has a hoard of men come and remove her from the home. This imagery conveys the mother’s impossibility of coping with and recovering from her loss amidst a patriarchal system that pathologizes her emotional experience.