The Typing Lady

This short story collection gathers eleven works of fiction linked by preoccupations with loss, memory, language, and the act of writing. Typewriters recur as objects connecting characters to the past and to creative expression.

The collection opens with "The Typing Lady: An Author's Note," in which an unnamed narrator observes a woman typing furiously in a library, studying her for months and noting their shared interests in philosophy, psychopharmacology, and figures like Borges and Benjamin. When the woman disappears, the narrator attends her book launch two years later and buys a signed copy. The title story is autofiction, or autobiographical fiction, about a writer who collects vintage typewriters that trigger memories of her parents and seem to generate fragments from abandoned work. After the book goes missing, the narrator dreams the typing lady extracts a tiny, living heart from a Remington Rand and swallows it, an image the narrator connects to creative inheritance and the collaboration between reader and writer.

"The Anthropologist's Kid" is narrated by Joji, the half-Japanese son of the chairman of Yale's Anthropology Department in the late 1960s. His best friend is Fatima, the half-Filipina daughter of untenured professor Manny Estrada. They spend afternoons typing on department secretaries' typewriters. When government agents visit, Joji's Japanese American mother, Michi, reacts with fury, connecting them to the agents who interned her family during World War II. Joji forcibly kisses Fatima, and she bites off the tip of his tongue, ending their friendship. Estrada does not receive tenure and takes his family to the Philippines. Years later, Fatima responds to Joji's apologetic letter, saying she remembers the decadence and greed of American children. After his parents' deaths, Joji finds a dried-out pussy willow catkin, Fatima's gift from the day they met, when he rescued her from older girls' bullying.

"Leafblower" follows Mel, a young woman with a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) degree in poetry, who lives above the garage of an elderly couple in a small college town. The Professor, a retired medievalist, and his wife, Dr. Fae, a former oncologist with dementia, need increasing help. Mel receives reduced rent for checking on them and works remotely as an editor. She secretly sells the Professor's books to cover her debts and types on a Remington Rand found in the garage, compiling a word-hoard, a collected trove of evocative Old English terms. After Mel is fired for using AI to automate team socials, the Professor discovers the missing books but, rather than evicting her, asks Mel to become Dr. Fae's caretaker for free rent and a fair wage. They develop a warm routine of exercise classes, thrift shopping, and drives. When the Professor has a giant rhododendron removed from outside Dr. Fae's window, the cardinal that had been attacking its reflection there disappears, and Dr. Fae becomes agitated. When Dr. Fae wanders from the house one morning, Caleb, a young Lawn Kings crew member, finds her on the road and brings her home.

"Immortal" is narrated by a person with pica, a condition involving eating non-food items, who consumes only plastic and describes the sensory pleasures of Bic pens, typewriter keys, and credit cards. The narrator misses Mandy, a former behavior technician who left after the narrator pretended to bite her. In a letter, the narrator argues that since all humans now consume microplastics, they are not so different, and invites Mandy to return, because plastic persists.

"The Death of the Last White Male" follows Grace and Bob, an American couple on a rural Canadian island, as Grace discovers their last white Silkie rooster killed by a hawk on Chinese New Year. Five months pregnant and anxious about hantavirus, toxoplasma, and avian flu, Grace hesitates over the New Year orange-rolling ritual. Bob bowls the oranges cheerfully through the house, and Grace's heart lifts, though when he peels one for her, the flesh is dry and insipid. He tells her to wait for the plums.

In "Ships in the Night," Baby, who is nearly 14, lives in a Vancouver carriage house with her mother, Cayenne, an aspiring romance novelist, and Cayenne's Quebecois boyfriend, Guy, a weed dealer. Baby's attic window overlooks an alley where young sex workers operate. When a visiting Seattle poet named Julien enters Baby's bedroom and attempts to seduce her, Baby takes his wallet and bangs on the window to alert Cayenne and Guy. After Cayenne proposes moving to Seattle for Julien, Baby confronts her and urges her to stay in Vancouver and finish her novel.

"Feelings" follows best friends Meghan and Kai, who attempt a school compassion assignment by making a lonely classmate, Patty Potts, their project. They follow Patty home and invent tragic backstories for her. When Meghan's parents divorce, she writes a personal essay alone, breaking their partnership. Kai types a sincere letter to Patty but never delivers it. Years later, the adult Kai, now a writer, reflects that her real failure was not compassion but imagination: She could not understand what Meghan was going through.

"One Art" is narrated by an aging writer with memory loss who recounts falling in love in 1978 with Professor L, a visiting Old English scholar at her women's college. After a dormitory conflict, the narrator is given a key to L's apartment, and they settle into weeks of domestic intimacy, reading Beowulf and lying entangled on the couch, though L's bedroom door stays closed. L confesses she shares the narrator's feelings but is committed to E, her longtime partner. When L tells E, E asks her to end it, and the narrator moves out. Years later, the narrator finds L's obituary and rediscovers a letterpress edition of Elizabeth Bishop's "One Art" that L gave her, now eaten by silverfish into lace, the final word, "disaster," mostly consumed.

"Dead Beat Poet" follows Caitlin, a disenchanted editorial assistant visited during a meeting by the ghost of a dead Beat poet. She inadvertently shouts "More poems!" aloud, channels the opening of Allen Ginsberg's "Howl," and is fired. The poet tells her it is okay to be unhappy and urges her to write before fading away.

"Where Ambition Goes to Die" is narrated by a husband on a remote Canadian island where ambitions manifest as ghostly figures. His wife's ambition, once fierce, is spotted hitchhiking toward the ferry. After the pandemic thwarted everyone's drives, the ambitions reappeared as timid shadows. The wife writes short pieces read aloud by the fire, and they sleep, dreaming unhaunted.

The collection closes with "The Problem of the Body," in which an aging novelist and her 17-year-old granddaughter, Maddie, share a sagging New England house. Maddie's mother, Emmy, died of breast cancer shortly after giving birth. The narrator's late husband, Stefan, a psychotherapist, guided Emmy through sessions with psilocybin, a psychedelic used in end-of-life therapy, helping Emmy face death peacefully. The narrator and Maddie devise humorous schemes to fake the narrator's death to avoid a book tour. Secretly, the narrator creates a dating-app profile, matching with boys and observing them at a coffee shop. Her third subject, Matt, a premed student who reads Chekhov, recognizes her as a novelist, and she accidentally reveals she knows his name from the app. She flees to a bridge, where she cries for the first time since Stefan's death. She calls Maddie to hear her voice, then drives home drawn to one ending of their fantasy: speeding north to Canada as a mysterious cousin, gloriously untethered.