Those Girls

Jessica Westhead

In Those Girls, Jessica Westhead's new collection of short stories, the style of Samuel Beckett meets the humour and content of a Dilbert cartoon. Westhead writes about modern suburban life with pathos, wit and razor-sharp dialogue. To read these stories is to take pleasure in the mundane, daily language we hear everywhere we go. Few people have the touch necessary to pull this off without seeming condescending or rude, but Westhead does it effortlessly. Those Girls narrates a bunch of guys whose lives are preoccupied with women — the women both in their lives and in their fantasies that they never quite understand. This is a book about how rarely people relate and the inexplicable nature of gender. These guys are neither articulate nor successful; they fumble through life spouting office clichés and eating combos. They talk about women at work, during lunch, or overhear them on the commuter train. They take advice from the wrong people and get obsessed with their co-workers' wives. These guys constantly try to get the attention of those girls and figure out what makes them tick, but all to no avail.

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Jessica Westhead

Jessica Westhead is a Toronto writer and freelance editor. Her short fiction has appeared in Matrix, Forget Magazine, Taddle Creek, Geist, THIS Magazine, Kiss Machine and the anthology Desire, Doom & Vice, and is forthcoming in The Antigonish Review. She also made poetry winner, a zine-exposé that blew the National Library of Poetry wide open. She has been featured in a number of Toronto reading series, including the Idler Pub, I.V. Lounge, Pontiac Quarterly and Lexiconjury, and has recently written a novel about an orange juice legacy, love and the perils of office life called Pulpy and Midge.
   

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