3 out of 5

Yeah yeah, happy ending, grand.  This is where Joan Wickersham can contact me to let me know that the ending isn’t supposed to be happy or sad, and that there’s not really an ending, and that the story is just what it says: An Inventory.  And fair enough.  But given that, I’m left somewhat dry by the structure, which somewhat just drops out at the end, defeating either an emotional purpose – as the journey feels stunted – or a documentary one, as the list feels incomplete.  Given the strength of the pre-conclusion aspects of the story – a narrator going through Boy #1, Boy #2 and so on from her life, from her first crush onward –  I lean toward the former, and it’s only really in comparison of those strengths that the end seems to lack.  Joan navigates us through these boys, and her narrator’s interactions with them or complete non-interactions with them, how they were obsessed over, or completely inconsequential, or only meaningful in retrospect, and she does so with a perfect balance of honesty and intelligence, never having us wallow in negativity or shining too bright a spotlight on any given aspect.  The details that hit are those offhand comments we all make (or I suppose we all make…), knocking ourselves down pegs and down pegs, alienating ourselves from these other humans who are probably going through their own version of the same; this is combined with an appealingly straight-forward recollection of the confusion of growing up female and dealing with the blackhole of boys; of sex; of emotions.

As our narrator gets older and seems to run a disconnect between the connections she thinks she should be having and the connections she really does, suddenly we get to the last page and she mentions she’ll meet her husband in a boy or two.  This is set next to a too-real re-meeting with a previous boy, whose then emotional progress is achieved through having to run his feelings past his therapist…  And so I can remind myself that this isn’t necessarily Joan’s autobiography, and that this is presumably fiction as inspired by her life… but… I’m still left dry by that ending, which hasn’t developed some of the ruminations that drove the earlier parts of the narrative, and which draws into question the intent of what we’ve read, and that it truly is just An Inventory leading up to “and then I met my husband…” and then there was a happy ending, I guess.

Lecture me on missing the point, or point me to where I forgot to note that this is an excerpt and not a full story.

But again, well constructed and very effectively written up until those final lines.