Fictional Family Life, Ashby’s immensely praised second collection, is a razor-sharp look at family life, focused around a teenaged boy who may, or may not, have tried to kill himself. That unclear violent act is dissected by two sets of narrators: Simon Tabor’s family members, and the doctors and nurses who put him back together again. While the truths and lies of real life are debated, broken Simon Tabor remains in his hospital bed, in an inexplicable coma, and in that netherworld, he creates his own alter ego, a boy his own age, also named Simon Tabor, who is stuck in his room, creating his alter egos—boys who live the fantastical lives both Simon Tabors wished for themselves.
The following excerpt is from “I Speak,” the only story in the collection in which the real Simon Tabor speaks for himself:
This is the only time you will hear my voice, the only time I will speak to you directly. Right now, I am on a table in an operating room and the doctor and nurses are racing around, working hard to repair the damage I have done to myself.
This isn’t one of those stories—about a near-death experience that changes one’s life, or a revelation about what happens when a person dies for some minutes and is revived. I haven’t died and I won’t. I am completely aware of everything going on around me, how, in their gowns and masks, the medical staff look like superheroes protecting their real identities.
Dr. Miner has just said, “Scalpel,” and is now slicing into my skin, a zzzziiiippppp through the various levels of dermis, then a sucking sound, my blood spurting all over, and he says in this tight voice, “Clamps, now,” and then he’s clamping off various of my blood vessels that are dancing like beheaded snakes. Even with all the activity, my hearing is so stupendous I can tell Judith, RN, is sorting through the plates and screws, and Louise, RN, through the pins, trying to find all the right-sized pieces of hardware Dr. Miner will soon insert into my body.
Hours from now, when Dr. Miner finishes stitching me physically back together, I plan to slip into an unexplained coma, and stay there for a good long time. I am looking forward to it. I think it will be fun, and restful, and give me time to think.
Plus, in the five hours I’ve already been in this operating room, I’ve discovered my own superhero power: I have the ability to know what’s going on in the private lives of these people caring for me.
Like Dr. Miner, for example, he’s setting my shattered left femur now, will do the right femur next, and while he’s focused precisely on what he’s doing, another part of his brain is back home, where just hours ago the woman he loves told him that she doesn’t love him, that he is lousy in bed, and that she has been sleeping around. He doesn’t want her to pack and leave him, but what else is a real man supposed to demand? I agree—the traitor has to go, who needs to love someone frightful like that?—but I can tell Dr. Miner is weak and this betrayal will affect him for the rest of his life.
And the anesthesiologist monitoring my pulse, calibrating my state of unconsciousness, she’s debating telling her husband she wants a boob job, to reduce, not to inflate, and she knows he’ll put up a fight, the way he loves doing all manner of things to them, stuff she can’t stand, and I can see in my mind the things her husband likes to do. I think the anesthesiologist might be kind of squeamish, because it all looks cool to me.
And Dr. Miner’s right-hand nurse, Judith Sonnen, she’s handing Dr. Miner a plate to screw into my femur, and she’s got a prayer running through her head in a gobbledygook language, praying not for me but for her own strength. Born Esther Sonnenberg, her parents turned into evangelical Baptists when she was a kid and changed everyone’s names, and Judith Sonnen thinks she may want to be the Jew she was born to be, reclaim her name at birth.
You can see, right, why I might not want to give up this power I’ve developed out of the blue.
Eventually, I’ll be wheeled into a hospital room, already deep in my coma. Here’s the warning. When I’m in my coma, you will hear theories about why I did what I did, posited by those who love me and will rarely leave my bedside: my parents, Renata and Harry, my sisters, Phoebe and Rachel, our occasional housekeeper, Consuela, and my dog, Scooter, as well as theories tossed about by Dr. Miner and the nurses, Judith and Louise, who feel a sort of love for me too, because they have seen inside my body, are invested in my slow progress back toward life.
But don’t believe any of them because they will all be wrong.
I was not depressed, psychotic, delusional, did not think I was Christ, or some disciple, or a prophet whose name I can’t pronounce. The blood tests will prove I wasn’t on drugs. I will, however, be on great painkillers for close to a year.
I have already conjured up my alter ego to entertain me during the silent months to come. His name is also Simon Tabor, and he’ll tell you about his life, and about the alter egos he—or rather I—create. Four boys, the same age as us, who live the kinds of lives we want to live. Both of us Simon Tabors stuck in rooms for very different reasons, yet sharing the same desire to experience other lives.
The bottom line is that my plan to fly did not go as expected. A lapse in judgment, I agree, and a question to be resolved another day. I’ll have plenty of time to figure it out, but here is Dr. Miner leaning over me—
It is impossible to overestimate the titanic interest that attended Ashby’s every move during those years when her collections dominated. In an era that pre-dates our current obsession with celebrity, her stunning success at such an early age, which also included receipt of a PEN/Malamud, and a Guggenheim, made her a phenomenon, one of the first literary celebrities on a modern-day scale. For a time, until she disappeared into small-town life, photographers often followed her—to the Korean grocery, the Laundromat, on her walks through the city.
Equally amazing is that Other Small Spaces and Fictional Family Life are now in their twenty-fifth and twenty-third printings respectively.
In William Linder’s first Wall Street Journal interview with Ashby, when she returned from the Other Small Spaces book tour, her remarks display an innocence at odds with the splendidly dark nature of her writing.