Heightened restrictions about what women can and cannot do with their bodies is just a fact of our world today. Half-Lives is a collection of stories by Lynn Schmeidler that explores themes of girlhood, sexuality, motherhood, identity, and aging–in a world bent on controlling the narrative–but where such conventions simply do not apply.
In these stories we find a woman who lists her body on Airbnb. Another story has a character who lies in state on the dais of her mother’s yoga studio. She is a veritable Sleeping Beauty. Why won’t anyone wake her up? In yet another story, an intern working at a museum confesses to having an affair—but she does it through a museum audio guide.
The stories are limned with absurdity and dark humor, but they deal with serious matters. And clues to the meaning lie in the surreal elements.
![](https://npr.brightspotcdn.com/dims4/default/4bf996b/2147483647/strip/true/crop/1458x1874+0+0/resize/880x1131!/quality/90/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fnpr-brightspot.s3.amazonaws.com%2F92%2Fb9%2F71bc8b5e4befb14fdad0ecba768a%2Fhalf-lives.jpg)
Lynn Schmeidler is the author of Half-Lives. It’s published by Autumn House Press.
Half-Lives was selected by Matt Bell as the winner of the 2023 Autumn House Rising Writer Prize in Fiction.
Read more about Lynn Schmeidler by visiting her website.