Amelia Gray’s Gutshot
Amelia Gray in her two short stories The Moment of Conception and Fifty Ways to Eat Your Lover preserves and capitalizes her consistency to deliver grotesque, surreal parables that mask the simple attributes of the human condition to love, understand love, and the surreal journey as well as the destination that love can take one person. In The Moment of Conception Gray manages to capsulate the desire and emotional drive for her characters in the first sentence of the story, "We wanted a child so badly!" (Gray 138). And the dissection of this sentence can not only lay out a schematic for Gray’s writing style, but also acts as a way of immediately implementing characterization into the couple by making …show more content…
It addresses the before, the near and the hereafter of a relationship. Gray masters in subtitle, so it is no surprise that such a narrative tool drive "The moment of conception." There is a subtitle masterful use of the comma and line placement in this story breaking up the two emotional statements in each paragraph with a sort of barrier not insisting that simple linearity is the only way her story can be read, “When he persuades you to spend the night, sink your teeth into his collarbone.” (Gray 129). Gray matches the expectation of the casual love affair with the combativeness of the human …show more content…
If read in the traditional manner, we get a story about a revengeful loved one. Split the story into two parts now by reading all of the "When" sections first before reading any of the second part, “Plunge a knife..” (Gray 129), and the story changes pace and the emotion becomes more clear, suggesting that the narrator is falling apart for all the kind and loving things that their lover has done for them, the story turns into one of fear for the loss of a loved one. Now read the bottom section first, “Seize his Achilles tendon.” (Gray 129), this time and the narrative shifts into that of someone who has already lost or broken up with that special someone, the tense of the situation has changed. The story plays with tense and lets the reader choose what tense to perceive the story in. Fifty Ways to Eat Your Lover is a wonderful story about the psychology of human love and relationships which invokes a different response out of the readers due strictly to their current relationship status or past experiences. Gray uses an abstract approach represented in a list format to ground very real human motions in reality. This is probably the most minimalist work out of all of Gray’s work in her collection, which I say that a majority of her stories follow a similar schematic layout.
Amelia Gray in her two short stories The Moment of Conception and Fifty Ways to Eat Your Lover preserves and capitalizes her consistency to deliver grotesque, surreal parables that mask the simple attributes of the human condition to love, understand love, and the surreal journey as well as the destination that love can take one person. In The Moment of Conception Gray manages to capsulate the desire and emotional drive for her characters in the first sentence of the story, "We wanted a child so badly!" (Gray 138). And the dissection of this sentence can not only lay out a schematic for Gray’s writing style, but also acts as a way of immediately implementing characterization into the couple by making …show more content…
It addresses the before, the near and the hereafter of a relationship. Gray masters in subtitle, so it is no surprise that such a narrative tool drive "The moment of conception." There is a subtitle masterful use of the comma and line placement in this story breaking up the two emotional statements in each paragraph with a sort of barrier not insisting that simple linearity is the only way her story can be read, “When he persuades you to spend the night, sink your teeth into his collarbone.” (Gray 129). Gray matches the expectation of the casual love affair with the combativeness of the human …show more content…
If read in the traditional manner, we get a story about a revengeful loved one. Split the story into two parts now by reading all of the "When" sections first before reading any of the second part, “Plunge a knife..” (Gray 129), and the story changes pace and the emotion becomes more clear, suggesting that the narrator is falling apart for all the kind and loving things that their lover has done for them, the story turns into one of fear for the loss of a loved one. Now read the bottom section first, “Seize his Achilles tendon.” (Gray 129), this time and the narrative shifts into that of someone who has already lost or broken up with that special someone, the tense of the situation has changed. The story plays with tense and lets the reader choose what tense to perceive the story in. Fifty Ways to Eat Your Lover is a wonderful story about the psychology of human love and relationships which invokes a different response out of the readers due strictly to their current relationship status or past experiences. Gray uses an abstract approach represented in a list format to ground very real human motions in reality. This is probably the most minimalist work out of all of Gray’s work in her collection, which I say that a majority of her stories follow a similar schematic layout.