Intimacies by Lucy Caldwell

Intimacies is a collection of fiction short stories about young women, mostly young mothers, unveiling the many layers of the women’s experiences as they go about more or less mundane parts of life. Despite not relating personally to many of the women’s lives (I’m childless by choice) I was captivated by their stories.

I love how Caldwell often uses settings or moments that seem relatively unremarkable — driving on the motorway, sitting on a plane, getting a drink with a coworker, sitting on the terrace in the evening — to reveal more significant aspects of the women’s lives or the human experience. For example, “All the People Were Mean and Bad” tells the story of a mother connecting with her neighbor on a plane, but it left me thinking about whether people are inherently good or bad, the impact of small acts of kindness on strangers, and how we decide which relationships to nurture and which to let go of. It’s no wonder that story won the BBC National Short Story Award, or that I enjoyed almost all the other stories in the collection — each of them felt easy to read and yet full of ideas that I pondered well after I closed the book.