Book Review of You Have a Friend in 10A by Maggie Shipstead

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An interesting collection of short stories by the author of “Great Circle”

There are eleven stories in the collection, ten of which are immediately readable and one of which, “Acknowledgements,” requires the reader to see the joke in order to persist. Acknowledgements is, as author’s acknowledgements always risk being, the potted autobiography of a literary twannock. One hopes it isn’t aimed at anyone in real life.

“The Cowboy Tango” is the best of the bunch, because the author ventures out of the artistic and show business worlds and into the great outdoors, where she avoids using too much purple prose to portray people actually living in the sort of spectacular landscape where people go on adventure holidays. “Backcountry” has an equivalent setting, but is about slightly different things.

“Angel Lust” and “You Have a Friend in 10A” both touch on the world of young starlets and the seeds of “Great Circle” are there to be seen, but just the seeds. You have a Friend in 10A is also about religious cults, or rather one cult in particular! The author’s take seems to be that what looks like abusive behaviour from the outside, might be what the starlets have decided to live with in order to live their dream. This is not the politically-correct view of the moment, but that might be how Hollywood veterans see it.

“Souterrain” is set in Paris and is the sort of thing that Anais Nin might have written if she hadn’t been writing erotica to pay the rent. “The Great Central Pacific Guano Company” touches on the undoubted truth that any well-trained French official will choose a futile death over being rescued by anyone English. “In the Olympic Village” is very nearly the sort of thing that Anais Nin was paid to write, set in an unnamed Olympic City (possibly Los Angeles) towards the fag end of the games.

There’s a clue to what the twist in the tail of “Lambs” is, in the dates the author gives for the lives of most the important artistic characters.

“La Moretta” is an ill-fated East European road trip in a Simca. It was a bit of a shock to find that the author is old enough to know what a Simca is, or maybe that was just research!

“You Have a Friend in 10A” by Maggie Shipstead is published in the UK by Random House on the 26^th of May 2022.