I Read Books: Daddy by Kristin Garth

 

Daddy by Kristin Garth

Art And The Artist

Formal disclosure: Kristin has published me via her Pink Plastic House website and press, and also nominated one of the poems she published for an award. Less formally, we have been in touch via various websites and social media.

Because of this I’m familiar with Kristin’s fiction, and of her past that she’s spoken and written about. When she announced this collection of stories, Daddy, I wasn’t sure this was my kind of thing. About father figures and dominance, about recovering – re-creating, re-discovering – a girlhood that was broken, about abuse and taking control of it. Those are not topics that habitually seize my attention.

But so what if they’re not my thing? Kristin and I have an online, transatlantic, writing relationship; our friendship is mostly made up of reading things. As I’ve said before, I read things that aren’t my thing all the time. This is important to her, so I should read it.

Still, I am an imperfect reader of this because I am not the audience for this. And an imperfect reviewer, because if my friend writes something I don’t like, I don't think is good, I will simply not mention it.

A Masculine Perspective

Some of these stories are about girlhood, in that they are about (narrated by) girls. They have the vital importance of these events for children. If I were to over-generalise these are about the breaking of an innocence. In Stall, the girl goes to the toilet in school, because she has thoughts she does understand and is not allowed privacy at home. Yet even here she is watched. In Quaintrelle the girl is barred from seeing another girl, as it has been reported their was a middle school orgy. In Spiderling the girl joins a club, the We Love Roman Everly Club. This leads her to disobey the rules and visit the house of a female murderer, the Black Widow.

Some of them are about girlhood less directly. The women in these stories are often looking for father figures. Sometimes they’ve found them and they hold them up to our gaze. They see the flaws in them, the terrible horrible people they are. They feel an attraction. In I Can Not Help It That I Have This Face he is beautiful, and she looks innocent. And so he feels the need to punish her, and she, she feels the need to submit, to be tied and beaten in a cable access studio in the mall.

The games of dominance and control are inevitably sexual, whether directly or peripherally.

In Florida Drakaina the woman lives alone in the woods. She has been abandoned by her Daddy, her lover, and the long, long drive is falling into disrepair. The neighbour, a retired builder, wants to buy it, to improve it. He needs something to do, but the woman needs her privacy. Needs her secrets.

Known for her sonnets, Kristin writes with deliberate rhythm. Her most distinctive lines tend towards the imperative/descriptive, telegraphic style that fits a meter. “Forgot your own name some months ago.” “No cellphones when you’re in middle school, so this story has no receipts.” “Rub against strangers in a thong for money – but not only money.”

A sonnet is the prologue to the novella at the end of the book, and another, unfinished sonnet plays a part in it. Another story is formatted as prose, though it maintains a Shakespearean sonnet form.

The final novella Plaything both stands alone and seems to sum up the book. At the Itty Bitty Kitty Coffee Shop Doria, the Stray, a waitress, has fucked a man in the alleyway. He’s a regular for a while. He picks up another woman, Melinda. He takes her away from all this, puts her in his mansion. There she becomes the Plaything and he becomes the Daddy. There she is safe, in her round of ballet lessons and true crime on parental controlled iPad and serving Daddy. She does not have to face the world. She does not have to make decisions.

The only one who knows she’s there is the Stray, the one who Daddy did not want. The one who hides her contact details with the Plaything. Why would the Plaything want to leave. There is nothing for her outside, only crime and stress. She is safe inside.

Until she learns what is within, the secrets her Daddy keeps from her.

My copy (in my hand)

A Family Trip To Florida

I’ve never been to Florida, the state that haunts this book, and that the book in turn haunts back. I was never a girl, nor had a girlhood of any sort and do not look to try and claim or reclaim one. On occasion I’ve had male role models and as often they have disappointed me, yet I wasn’t looking for a father, a protector. The games of dominance and submission – well we all play some of that, that is what living in human society is. But I don’t place them at the heart of relationships, invite them into the bedroom and back out again. On the face of it this book is not my thing.

This isn’t important. Reading things that aren’t my thing might be difficult, though here the prose is crystal clear and silky smooth. So the girls oppressed by family and rules and school and the customs of their fellow students, I see them and feel their quiet despair. The women who have grown up wanting to be controlled, in turn taking their own control through submission, I grasp their desires.

The book takes me to places I didn’t know about and I’m richer for learning about them.

Skip To The End

Read This: A journey through a more-or-less dreamlike Florida in search of childhood and fathers
Don’t Read This: Too many explorations of intertwining girlhood and abuse, violence and control
Disclosure: I have been published by Kristin Garth’s website Pink Plastic House
Available From: Anxiety Press, or Pink Plastic House, or online bookshops. For more from Kristin, try her substack