Embracing the Absurd

A Review of Anna Dickson James’ Boys Buy Me Drinks to Watch Me Fall Down

By Alex Carrigan

In her short story collection Boys Buy Me Drinks to Watch Me Fall Down, Anna Dickson James brings together 18 stories that examine the mental, emotional, and social oddities of gender roles in the traditional and speculative sense. The stories in the collection range from the amusingly mundane to the uncomfortably surreal, covering a wide array of social environments where men and women can conform to or deny their prescribed roles. While this may seem like quite the anarchic collection, Boys Buy Me Drinks is more focused on how these lived experiences hold onto an emotional core in the midst of the absurdity.

Many of the stories in James’ collection focus on couples at various stages of their lives as they begin, end, or remain content in a specific period of the relationship. “Paddle Like Hell” features a couple discussing their future together and the commitments and changes that will come from it, while “Who’s a Good Girl?” looks at a family that has built and moved into a new home in the mountains of West Virginia. Both stories look at couples examining changes, the former discussing names for their future child and what car they’ll drive, while the latter looks at how a family adjusts after having committed to a major change.

Other stories in the collection are taken from the POV of a woman in an awkward place in her life and what could draw her to make radical changes. “Proud to Be a Shriner’s Wife” looks at a woman who sees her friend about to leap into an exciting new life and how that contrasts with her mundane one. “The Rapture of Anne Marie Abbot,” one of the best stories in the whole collection, looks at a pastor’s wife as she has to reckon with how her relationship can lead to repression and arrested development in her emotional and sexual identity. James’ stories don’t suggest there is a preferable or ideal way to live, but how most gender roles assigned to women can ultimately be shaped by so many outside forces that it leads to more uncertainty and confusion than one realizes.

It’s also when James allows the stories to get more surreal and at times horrifying that she’s able to look deeper into these subjects. For some of the quieter, grounded pieces, “The Art of Drowning” examines a woman who has replaced her identical twin sister after her sister’s death in order to find a more meaningful life. “The Easy Chair,” one of the few stories from a male POV, looks at how one man’s obsession to obtain something perfect and earned (in this case, making the best massage chair possible), derails his entire life in the pursuit of comfort and relaxation.

When James goes harder into the surreal horror aspect, it’s when the body stops being gendered and becomes more broken down. Many of these pieces involve the body being broken down or consumed, two of which, “Sommelier Mort Vivant” and “Mersa and the Cannibal,” deal with the consumption of flesh through zombies and cannibals. In both stories, the POV character has long sense detached the identity from the flesh they wish to consume and become a mix of voyeur and predator. Both protagonists simply look at their target as something that will sustain them for a time, but without really thinking about the greater weight of their actions.

Despite this, James is willing to write pieces that focus on quieter, meaningful moments where the main achievement is that the protagonist of the piece manages to make some sort of connection. “Roller Derby Doll” focuses on the protagonist’s first roller derby match, while “The Girl in the Piñata” focuses on a man breaking his antisocial habits following a mailing mishap. The titular story is similar, focusing on a woman making fleeting, but satisfying connections with others while at a conference hotel.

Boys Buy Me Drinks to Watch Me Fall Down is a collection of sharp, absurd prose, but one that really understands the need to look at all the dimensions of the body. No one person can be defined by a single trait, and while the traits that make a person can lead them to harm, they can also lead to forging meaningful bonds and enacting growth. James’ collection is odd, but it touches on just how easy it is to be defined as “odd” and why that isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

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