Caitlin Horrocks's 23 MONTHS
23 Months redraws the lines between who we are and who we want to be. Leah is well aware she is telling us a story, that she can tell us anything, but try as she might she can't help but let her stubborn honesty spill out. And it's in this stubborn honesty that she charms us, that we recognize her for ourselves. She could have made herself a better person in her own story—braver and more beautiful—but in the end, she loves us enough to tell us what she doesn't want us to know.
Caitlin Horrocks is author of the story collection This Is Not Your City (Sarabande Books). Her stories and essays appear in The New Yorker, The Best American Short Stories 2011, The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories 2009, The Pushcart Prize XXXV, The Paris Review, Tin House, One Story, and elsewhere. Her work has won awards including the Plimpton Prize and a Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference Fellowship. She is a fiction editor at West Branch, and teaches at Grand Valley State University in Grand Rapids, Michigan.