Editor Jo Derrick shares, in the chatty, comfortable way that women tend to communicate, how the British literary journal The Yellow Room rose from the ashes of Quality Women’s Fiction and Cadenza. And the stories in this anthology read like diaries, psychoanalytic confessions and sometimes, suicide notes. The momentum of the women’s movement in the UK and the United States, where the writers featured in this issue hail from might have slowed, but you’d never know it from the pace of this tightly written anthology. I liken the overall style to that of American writer Pam Houston, whose minimalism mimics that of Raymond Carver, and who projects a mirror image of T. Coraghessan Boyle’s male relationship angst.

I detest labels, but this is literary fiction. None of the stories contain more than a hint of the speculative, and all are compelling. I was struck by the number of mature protagonists, which puts The Yellow Room in a different category from traditional chick-lit. They examine serious issues in lives and relationships battered by harsh realities, but all have a comforting sense of women in control of their destinies even as they struggle, stumble, and fall.

Zoe Fairbairns’ protagonist in “Decisions” faces many.

In the immediate aftermath of bereavement, you should avoid making big decisions [...] And I’m not just talking about the ones hospice people throw at you-”Tea, coffee, herbal infusion or a double scotch?” “Priest, rabbi, imam or secular humanist grief counsellor?”

“I just want to go home,” I said.

“Yes, get her out of here,” said his wife.

The unnamed first person narrator leads us through the days after her married lover dies, the decisions she faces as she deals with his wife, her own future, and her grief. Lovely, ironic, sardonic, and life affirming.

In one of several stories with male protagonists, Jo Waterworth examines the plight of a mother struggling to raise her son to do the right thing after his absent father didn’t. Though we follow Nicko and his exploits to get a new pair of trainers, we learn much more about his mother and the challenges she faces in “His Father’s Footsteps.”

“An Antique Affair” by Carol Rogers is a hilarious account of a middle-aged bachelor James, who is as intrigued by Grace as she is with him. James has issues with performance, and not the artistic kind. He thinks that Grace’s coral pink lipstick stain on an antique tea cup is a better omen than the blood red of his last lover. But Grace has plans of her own. The dual point of view works well in this story as both make plans to spend some time together. Though we don’t get to see what happens after Grace decides to live a bit, I suspect it will be a happy, or at least a humorous ending.

“The Archeology of Ironing” by Sarah Bower.  Choices, and consequences. A former archeologist now unearths memories from the ironing pile and cleans up her baby’s shitty behind. Her husband’s ex-wife drops in while she’s up to her elbows, and the reader wonders who actually won in the battle for Clive.

She started up this gardening business, after she and Clive were divorced.

“Won’t they mind a second hand plant.?”

“It’s no different to moving house and taking over someone else’s garden, isn’t it?” She glances around the kitchen. “Ironing,” she says after a pause, “never done when they’re little. Thank God Sam and Charlie are old enough to do their own.”[...]

I catch myself wanting to tell her the way to the back door [...] the back door where her sons still leave their trainers when they visit. I wanted to rebuild this kitchen, not merely redecorate it, to erase the layer of its history which contained the bones of Clive’s first marriage.”

The first person narration gives the reader a good sense of the dichotomy between thought and action, and like other stories in this anthology, the fact she is not named gives this a “this could be me” feel.

Simon seems to have trouble with women, but we never find out what happened with Karen. In a very clever use of metaphor and onomatopoeia, Rose Barry sneaks in several forebodings of what’s to come in “Bone Fever.”

Sara was popular, as she asked for the older people’s advice and followed it. They brought her their tastiest strawberries, luscious raspberries and French beans that snapped crisply in the middle, offerings to her youth and inexperience.

Simon likes things that crack but remains clueless as to why women, his mother included, are freaked out by that. Which is what makes this story the first of the two creepy ones in this anthology.

The second is “Deadlocked” by Christine Todd. Omniscient narration takes us seamlessly from the head of shopkeeper, Rose, to the armed robber, Jimmy, effectively allowing the reader to play the psychological game of Russian roulette with them. I won’t spoil it by telling who wins or sharing any of the goose bump raising description, metaphor, and superb characterization. 

Vanda Inman names every character in “Searching,” except the protagonist and the man she is obsessed with.

I’ve come to realise that most people are craving three things-attention, affection and love. And most of these people would aspire to being happily married-whatever their definition of happily married is.

That effectively puts everyone else, including the reader, in the same position of the woman and “Mr. Moonlightandroses” who she met at a conference and continues to exchange text messages with long after she returns home.

Suzie Lockhart-Smith’s “The Modern Green” is somewhere in Africa, and a hell hole of filth and prostitution. The protagonist can’t face the latrine, but is finally driven to leave the man she’s been talking with all night by the physical discomfort. She finally voids her bladder and purges herself of all the other dreams of coming to Africa to find her roots and realizing they don’t exist.

“Once” by Penny Feeny is an inventive story which is recounts an older widow’s memories from each room of the house her son is desperately trying to convince her to sell. It seems the renovations she and her late husband lovingly performed as a couple failed to unearth the secret of the attic. Which takes us back to the beginning-and that son.

In Sally Zigmond’s “Two-Part Inventions” the rift between Ruth and Jane is not new. Ruth was favored over her sister, got piano lessons, and everything else she wanted. What Jane doesn’t realize is the price Ruth paid to become a concert pianist. And Ruth doesn’t share why she never showed up for her mother’s funeral, and is leaving immediately after her father’s.

The piano waits for her in the centre of the stage; flood lit. On a bad day, when the pain in her fingers brings tears to shine so that critics refer to her being “lost in the music” it is an instrument of torture. Or it is a wide blood red bed on which she pleasures herself an they speak of passion and orgasmic intensity. Either way, they are only vibrations creating a series of blows on a contraption of wood, ivory and metal.

Every story in The Yellow Room, Issue 1 reads like the characters telling real life stories. It’s women’s fiction because of the spotlight on feminine emotions and experiences, but men would likely achieve some insight therein.