If you’ve listened to this podcast before, you know that we love short stories and that we hold the stories of Gina Berriault in such high regard; they sort of set the standard.
“Stolen Pleasures” is a story about two sisters. Fleur is seven years older than Delia.
We meet them in childhood, but the story jumps to their adult lives and back again.
One sister survived being hit by a car. She has a lazy eye and grows up in a home without a piano— without many things that both sisters want.
The other sister survived scarlet fever and wants for more, too,
The sisters have a blind mother and a father who had been labeled the black sheep in his family.
These are some of the things we know about these characters—but we learn them incrementally, gradually. And it would seem there are many secrets about the “Stolen Pleasures” of each character about which we only know very little. We learn a little more as we continue to read the story.
As a story about siblings who know that they might not be able to ever have the things they want from this world, it would seem a very ordinary kind of story, but that is simply not so.
As Peter Orner surmises, Berriault has a talent for taking ordinary characters and situations and imbuing them with a fullness and a dignity that maybe all the rest of us want and deserve, too. There is something powerfully emotional in that.
This is the way that Berriault manages her characters—these outsiders, suffering the losses of coveted goals that they can’t quite name but that they hunger for just the same.
As with all of Berriault’s stories, discussing “Stolen Pleasures” for Peter Orner and me is simply not an easy thing. Our emotions are high and settle in our throats about this story that is the furthest thing from maudlin or mawkish. Not a bit of that here.
In fact, in our discussion, I conclude that it is knowing that Berriault may only want to depict truth and honesty in these stories—in a world where there is so little truth and honesty—that makes me admire it so much. Emotions are high in this one.
As Peter Orner says, Berriault can take “sensational” situations and make them “subtle.” It is in that subtlety that the poignancy can speak to us.
We like to say we geek out over stories on The Lonely Voice. Indeed.
