Name: Lindy's review of You Will Never Be Forgotten by Mary South
Item: You Will Never Be Forgotten
Rating: 3
Author: Lindy

Mary South

In this provocative, bitingly funny debut collection, people attempt to use technology to escape their uncontrollable feelings of grief or rage or despair, only to reveal their most flawed and human selves An architect draws questionable inspiration from her daughter’s birth defect. A content moderator for “the world’s biggest search engine,” who spends her days culling videos of beheadings and suicides, turns from stalking her rapist online to following him in real life. At a camp for recovering internet trolls, a sensitive misfit goes missing. A wounded mother raises the second incarnation of her child. In You Will Never Be Forgotten, Mary South explores how technology can both collapse our relationships from within and provide opportunities for genuine connection. Formally inventive, darkly absurdist, savagely critical of the increasingly fraught cultural climates we inhabit, these ten stories also find hope in fleeting interactions and moments of tenderness. They reveal our grotesque selfishness and our intense need for love and acceptance, and the psychic pain that either shuts us off or allows us to discover our deepest reaches of empathy. This incendiary debut marks the arrival of a perceptive, idiosyncratic, instantly recognizable voice in fiction—one that could only belong to Mary South.

Stories

You Will Never Be Forgotten

Nicholas Barnard

'Wickedly, exquisitely hilarious' Alexandra Kleeman 'Open-source desire, self-replicating fantasy' Tom McCarthy 'A brilliant and brilliantly strange and strangely funny and menacing debut!' Sam Lipsyte In this provocative, bitingly funny debut collection, people attempt to use technology to escape their uncontrollable feelings of grief, rage or despair, only to reveal their most flawed and human selves. An architect draws questionable inspiration from her daughter’s birth defect. A content moderator for 'the world’s biggest search engine,' who spends her days culling videos of beheadings and suicides, turns from stalking her rapist online to following him in real life. At a camp for recovering internet trolls, a sensitive misfit goes missing. A wounded mother raises the second incarnation of her child. In You Will Never Be Forgotten, Mary South explores how technology can both collapse our relationships from within and provide opportunities for genuine connection. Formally inventive, darkly absurdist, savagely critical of the increasingly fraught cultural climates we inhabit, these ten stories also find hope in fleeting interactions and moments of tenderness. They reveal our grotesque selfishness and our intense need for love and acceptance, and the psychic pain that either shuts us off or allows us to discover the greatest depths of empathy. This incendiary debut marks the arrival of a perceptive, idiosyncratic, instantly recognizable voice in fiction – one that could only belong to Mary South.

Lindy

This book is unofficially divided into three sections.

The first, containing "Keith Prime," "The Age of Love," "Frequently Asked Questions About Your Craniotomy," "Architecture for Monsters," and "The Promised Hostel," contains stories dealing with reproduction and embodiment. Unfortunately, these started to feel formulaic very quickly as especially when read in succession to one another, they came off as exercises in developing unreliable narrators, and the narrators are mostly unreliable in the same way. I liked "Architecture for Monsters" the most. "The Promised Hostel" is, like, peak MFA. 

The second consists of "You Will Never Be Forgotten," "Camp Jabberwocky for Recovering Internet Trolls," and "To Save the Universe, We Must Also Save Ourselves." These stories are primarily about the empathy-less internet and form the crux of the book's marketing. It is also the weakest section. I suspect that these stories were born of the desire to dunk on hypocrites on the author's Twitter feed 5-10 years ago. I am not immune to the impulse to dunk on hypocrites, but idk, keep it to your Twitter feed unless there's a more complex point, and there isn't really here.

The two stories in the third section, "Realtor to the Damned" and "Not Setsuko," are ghost stories. "Not Setsuko" is, for me, the most immediately emotionally compelling and best story in the collection. I liked it a lot! It's actually very similar to "Keith Prime," but distilled and refined. It brings the book full circle, and I don't think that's an accident.

ananya

Kate Sigrist

Jennifer

Amy Maddess

Brilliant, imaginative, original, satirical stories from an exciting young American writer - for fans for George Saunders and Ted Chiang.

Nicholas Barnard &
You Will Never Be Forgotten by Mary South

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Nicholas Barnard &You Will Never Be Forgotten by Mary South

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Nicholas Barnard &
You Will Never Be Forgotten by Mary South