Robin Romm

Urgently exploring a contentious, long-ignored paradox that confronts modern women, this anthology breaks the last feminist taboo once and for all.

Women on Ambition

Double Bind

a memoir of three weeks

The mercy papers

A first collection of short works explores a theme of loss with tales that feature such protagonists as a man who uses a chicken egg to test his readiness for fatherhood, a daughter who plants a garden of mothers to replace her own, and a woman who discovers her deadbeat father asleep in the desert after more than a quarter century's absence. 20,000 first printing.

Stories

The Mother Garden

When we meet Shalem, a young woman in her late 30s, she is enduring small talk at a cocktail party hosted by one of her husband’s colleagues. One talks about her breast milk and her twins; another frets about the matronly ass of his girlfriend. Shalem has arrived at the age of no longer young but not old and balancing the in-between. What she wears isn’t cool. What she thinks isn’t cool. She loves her husband but wonders where the passion has gone. When she bumps into the hostess of the party, a writer who has been researching a new play, the playwright reports that experts say any couple still having sex after five years of marriage does so only because of an active fantasy life. At first, that notion is perplexing to Shalem, but the more she thinks about it, the more game she is. When she embraces the idea and fantasizes about a work colleague, it gets things going. But now Shalem has a new plight—navigating between her fantasy world and reality.

It's What You Think (When You Think about Cheating)

When Robin Romm's The Mother Garden was published, The New York Times Book Review called her "a close-up magician," saying, "hers is the oldest kind [of magic] we know: the ordinary incantation of words and stories to help us navigate the darkness and finally to hold the end at bay." In her searing memoir The Mercy Papers, Romm uses this magic to expand the weeks before her mother's death into a story about a daughter in the moments before and after loss. With a striking mix of humor and honesty, Romm ushers us into a world where an obstinate hospice nurse tries to heal through pamphlets and a yelping grandfather squirrels away money in a shoe-shine kit. Untrained dogs scamper about as strangers and friends rally around death, offering sympathy as they clamor for attention. The pillbox turns quickly into a metaphor for order; questions about medication turn to musings about God. The mundane and spiritual melt together as Romm reveals the sharp truths that lurk around every corner and captures, with great passion, the awe, fear, and fury of a daughter losing her mother. The Mercy Papers was started in the midst of heartbreak, and not originally intended for an audience. The result is a raw, unsentimental book that reverberates with humanity. Robin Romm has created a tribute to family and an indelible portrait that will speak to anyone who has ever loved and lost.

Robin Romm

About

Books

Join the club