Beautiful and Contemplative: A Review of Ellen Birkett Morris's Lost Girls
Ellen Birkett Morris’s first collection centers around the lives of women—some lost, some found, and all searching for more. It’s this thread of longing woven through the stories that pulls them tighter and tighter, fine-tuning the tension and exploring the different ways women discover who they are as individuals, beyond their restrictive places in society.
Morris shows great range with her characters, from young girls to older women who “never planned to be obsolete.” As seventy-year-old Abby Linder says in “Harvest,” “The years had slipped away, and the person she had been disappeared with them, replaced by an old woman with wrinkles and bifocals, who men opened doors for or offered a hand up but nothing more.” In the story, despite everyone’s efforts to make her confront that she’s old, Abby finds a way to recapture her youth while visiting a friend at the nursing home.
By contrast, there is the teenager in the titular story, who lives in the same town as a thirteen-year-old girl kidnapped from a strip mall. Even though “creeped out,” the main character imagines her own disappearance would be a welcome surprise—one less reason for her parents to fight, and for her, “a change of scenery.” Dreaming about her new life she imagines captors who look like Archie Bunker and serve her cake, the worst aspect of it all being life “in some commune, forced to mix batches of granola and make homemade yogurt day and night.” Even as she ages, she sees the kidnapped Dana as “somebody’s prize.” This teen’s mindset—the naivete, the selfishness—leaps from the page, with the story ending at a startling moment. What’s impressive as well is that Morris is able to convey all of this in three pages.
One of the strongest stories in the collection is “Skipping Stones,” which is also the longest, at sixteen pages. Here we follow Terri through her last year of high school and her relationships with a boy she thinks she might like, his older brother, and a third boy who believes he’s entitled to take what he wants. Shadows of violence haunt the story, along with a depressed mom and the father who has abandoned Terri and her mother. At graduation, her father “sat alone in the last row and handed her an envelope with a $50 bill inside.” These are such small details—the last row, the fifty-dollar bill—but point to one of Morris’s real strengths: presenting understated moments so clearly they resonate with the reader. The reader knows from the details how awkward the father feels, and that handing over fifty bucks is no small act of generosity for him.
Another standout story, “Religion,” follows a thirty-year-old virgin who stumbles into a Lactation League meeting, and becomes so enamored with the bonds between babies and moms that she rents a breast pump in hopes of capturing the magic. Morris goes well beyond the story’s creative premise and into the loneliness, desperation, and hunger this woman feels. Once again, Morris has fine control of tension. As the story moves forward and the protagonist bonds with these new moms, one of them asks her to babysit, and while doing so, the character attempts to breastfeed. The instability of the woman, combined with the narrator’s empathy toward her, leaves the reader shattered at the end of the story.
Many of the stories here clock in at three or four pages, and the majority are under ten. While all showcase Morris’s talents for details, some of the shorter feel less fleshed out and more like character studies, albeit well-drawn ones. Overall, this is a beautiful and contemplative collection, exploring the supposedly simple lives of complicated women who survive grief, loneliness, and love, and emerge on the other side having found themselves.
