xTx's He Is Talking to the Fat Lady: A Review By Lauren Schmeer

Reading xTx’s newest chapbook He Is Talking to the Fat Lady gives me the feeling of being laughed at while I’m huddled over in pain, and I appreciate it more with every read. There’s an empowered anger in each piece, an anger willing to fuck you with a barbed wire fence and enjoy the sight of a Pterodactyl swooping down to tear the shit out of you and share your meat with its babies. But it’s an anger that stops at having potential, that won’t culminate in action, and that is what makes this chapbook so strong.

xTx captures the anger so vividly and alluringly, but the characters talk big, think big, and are in positions where they’re just going to keep getting punched in the stomach again. They have a rage ready to explode but they’re stuck in their lawn chairs.

The story for which the chapbook is named is certainly its strongest: a beautiful and grabbing story on its own. It moves more gradually than the other pieces until it hits its brilliant note at the end, delivered by the entrance of mouthbreathing Sabrina. It begins with subtlety, and the buildup and the images that accompany it are addicting. xTx incorporates setting most strongly in this story, which really puts you in the place of the narrator, feeling the dryness of your mouth steadily increasing as you sit under a wimpy tree, getting what shade you can on a hot day. Both Sabrina and the barbecuing man appear vividly before you and the resolution at the end, including to eat another rice cake, sits with you with all its possible meanings.

The other anchors for this chapbook are “When I Take Him to Yosemite He Forgets Her” and “A Wager”. These, along with the title story, are the standout pieces that the rest rely on to work.  The details in the former story work because they’re bizarre and unreal, but the characters feel human even if their language and actions aren’t. xTx writes about a situation that can never feel normal–the moment a mother gives her daughter up for adoption to another woman–by purposely avoiding normalcy in many ways. She incorporates a blunt, swearing, and sometimes-profound baby, and expertly places talk of giving up a child between dialogue about melted cheese and a roasted vegetable sandwich.

“A Wager” is bizarre but quiet and was the right piece to end on. It ends the chapbook with sadness and still with humor; it impresses you with its uniqueness and grittiness, two of the greatest strengths of the chapbook overall. The hooker and the man who solicitors her are incredibly endearing and their story is pathetically sad yet somehow hopeful. The moment when the man wipes a-special-something onto his face is the most hopeful and endearing gesture of the chapbook, but of course is simultaneously incredibly humorous, heartbreaking, and repulsive.

While “A Wager” ended the chapbook off perfectly, I was disappointed with the opening story “Payout” which I found to be the chapbook’s weakest. It was a story that never fully came together and feels distanced by its third-person narration. It did however appropriately introduce the physicality of the rest of the chapbook. Physical pain plays a large role in this chapbook as xTx interweaves pain with sex, self-image, and love. She shows the way pain can demean and the way it can empower you with rage. In “A List of the 10 Things I Will Think About Instead of You” xTx also reminds readers of the incredible power of the perfectly and elaborately worded “fuck you”.

He Is Talking to the Fat Lady should be read, if not for the beautiful title story and the strength of its other pieces, its grittiness or its uniqueness, then for the many perfect and elaborate ways it gives you to say “fuck you”. It should be read especially for those ways involving a Pterodactyl.

He Is Talking to the Fat Lady is available as a digital download with audio from Safety Third.

Lauren Schmeer writes and studies fiction at the University of Pittsburgh.