Big girls don’t cry
Jana Martin’s characters scramble out of their desperate lives.
By Jonathan Messinger

Plenty of writers plumb their day jobs for subject matter—witness the unending stream of novels about office life. But few are able to pick up a theme from their work and bring it into their fiction the way Jana Martin has done in her new short-story collection, Russian Lover (Yeti/Verse Chorus Press, $15.95).

“I did a story once [for Marie Claire] about women who had gone to extreme measures, these women who had done all of these things to their bodies with plastic surgery,” she says. “And this was before plastic surgery was so grotesquely normal. I not only interviewed them, but I had to get them to agree to pose naked for the magazine. I was very proud of that story.”

While plastic surgery doesn’t play a role in Russian Lover, Martin’s interest in women pushed to the extreme clearly extends from her journalism to her fiction. In the opening story, “Hope,” which won the Glimmer Train Short Story Award for New Writers in 1999, a woman hooked on heroin boards a Greyhound from Boston to Florida, leaving her loser ex-boyfriend behind. The impetus is a bad infection from a dirty needle, but the reader slowly gets the impression there’s more to the story than the standard junkie-on-the-mend motif. The character’s old-fashioned father arrives in the story via phone calls and memories, and one wonders which of the two is more sad.

In “Why I Got Fired,” a stripper runs through a litany of abuses, including harassment from her landlord, a police officer and countless paying customers. The story begins with her at 19, giving a lap dance to a guy who’s unzipped his pants. In a poetic, real-time voice, the narrator reacts: “Jumping off the rude guy and clocking him in the jaw.” After leaving Cleveland for a “new city five years later,” she has to put up with more of the same. Only this time, her reaction is fiercer: “Glorious hands out and waiting for a man’s naked silly neck and yelling This one’s for Cleveland.”

Many of the women similarly toe the line between tough and vulnerable, endearingly troubled troublemakers. Rather than a single action or decision forging the conflict of the stories, the characters’ entire lives up until the moment of the story serve as the driving force. When we tell Martin she seems to have a curious affection for, and interest in, damaged women, she bristles at our word choice.

“I think of them as girls on the lam,” she says. “Damaged implies a type of psychological state to me. But these are girls in desperate situations. Certainly they’re in dire straits that they haven’t quite figured out how to fix. But they’re trying to fix it.”

It has been eight years since “Hope” got her noticed in literary circles, though this is Martin’s debut. She says a novel—distilled into the dominatrix story here called “Rubber Days”—came close to publication, but its racy nature scared off some editors. She’s continued to work as a freelance writer, and as a freelance editor for The New York Times, from her home in Woodstock, New York.

When a friend of hers who edits the revered Portland, Oregon, music magazine Yeti began asking her for work, it became clear hers would be the first book published by Yeti’s new press. Like the characters in her stories, the actual stories had figured out a way to get out of a desperate situation.

“I had a lot of friends who had thrived on small presses, and I felt this was the thing to do,” she says. “At the time, my mother was very sick, and I wanted to publish these stories as a group in a safe place. These guys were an incredibly safe home.”

Martin reads Tuesday 10 as part of the Bookslut series.

http://www.timeout.com/chicago/article/books/20881/big-girls-dont-cry