The writer Elizabeth Geoghegan has lived in the Roman neighborhood of Trastevere for many years, but she was born in New York and grew up in the Midwest of the USA. This trajectory is reflected in her Eight Ball, a set of ironic stories published by Nórdica that He draws from the best tradition of American short stories by Raymond Carver or Dorothy Parker, but above all from Lucia Berlin, who was his mentor long before his work rose to fame and became a posthumous publishing phenomenon.
“If she knew that I was associated with her, she would probably laugh, because at that time nobody read her stories. We would laugh together that she was so famous for someone to care that I learned from her, ”says Geoghegan in a cafe in central Rome. Berlin was her writing teacher when she was old and sick, and Geoghegan became her driver and confidante while a small group of students came to her home's living room because of the teacher's physical conditions. "We share difficulties in our environment, addiction issues in our families, but her life was much more extraordinary than mine," says the protégé humbly. Berlin's death affected him deeply.
However, the life of his disciple has not been boring either. She landed in Italy in the nineties looking for inspiration and stayed for a job in the world of cinema. "Although my dream had always been to be a novelist." She now combines writing with classes at the university.
The stories were not her initial plan either, but in the end, for one reason or another, she ended up emulating her great mentor in this, rescued from anonymity thanks to her Manual for cleaning women. She has ended up liking her format, since she believes that it adapts very well to the needs of speed and the rush of current times, especially after the pandemic. "It's hard to read a very long novel now," he jokes. Especially male writers continue to write these huge novels."
“If Lucia Berlin is a precocious Patti Smith, Geoghegan would be Blondie, Joan Jett and Florence and the Machine mixed into one generous bite,” poet Susan Bradley Smith says of her.
With a fresh and realistic style, Eight Ball narrates in most cases the stories of intrepid women who suffer from the selfishness of men. "I'm not trying to show women as weak, but despite certain things we have weaknesses. They're usually very strong and they find a way out of it,” she tells of the toxic men she calls boys in his stories: the tree boy, the dog boy, the cricket boy. All of them pose emotional situations of Generation X, born between 1961 and 1981.
“We have always been told that we have to be in a relationship, no matter how independent and educated and successful we are. Still, being alone never seems like an option. I disagree with this,” she notes as she sips her cappuccino. “Women can be alone and be happy. You don't need to be a mother, you don't need to be a wife. I wanted to show that the most intimate relationships we have are with ourselves.”
The result is a succession of stories that builds to a crescendo until reaching A Roman Story, a story based on a real experience he had in the Italian capital, when walking through Trastevere he found himself at the scene of an infanticide. Or Eight Ball, which gives the book its title, the only story where the narrator is a man. Always between idyllic settings of landscapes as different as Thailand, Paris, Rome or Seattle. Movements that Geoghegan identifies with his life and his numerous trips, because, perhaps because he lives far from his family, he has "a stronger feeling of self-confidence."
