How Strange a Story is a volume published in 2022 by Megan Mayhew Bergman. The book is a collection of short stories that is filled out to full length by a novella. This is the author's third such collection, following the critically acclaimed Birds of a Lesser Paradise (2012) and Almost Famous Women (2016). While there is no rigidly defined unifying aspect tying these stories together, most do coalesce around themes involving female empowerment, sexism, and gender relations.
The book is structured in an idiosyncratic way. Six short stories are followed by the significantly longer novella, "Indigo Run," only to return for what seems almost like a bonus short story as its conclusion. While the focus is on strong female characters, several other finer details connect many of the stories. For instance, both "The Heirloom" and "The Inheritance" tells stories heavily leaning upon the inheritance received by their protagonists. Names like Regan, Farrah, Hayes, and Darcy situate these protagonists, at least on some subliminal level perhaps, as being special cases that are not intended to be interpreted as any sort of "everywoman."
Even more so are the focuses of these women in their stories. One wife makes a deal with her husband to trade four days of being a perfect wife for three days of utter independence. Another uses advice from a dominatrix to run a business taking advantage of rich men's insecurities over not being muscular blue-collar guys by paying big money for the privilege of using John Deere as a weapon against abandoned vehicles. And, of course, there is also a story that involves a glass house. A glass house built on a cliff overlooking the sea, at that.
The title is appropriate throughout. While neither the characters nor the narratives themselves are exactly strange, they are stories involving strangeness. It is this subtle sense of strangeness which infuses this collection of more women-centric tales from the author's previous two story collections. Somehow, most of these stories would seem out of place within the either previous publication. This makes them all suitable for inclusion in a collection unifying them—without directly connecting them—under the book's known title.
