Varied in subject but tethered by their interest in prospecting the border between self and other, Robin Romm’s short stories relay the inner lives of contemporary women: the young mother who wonders if her marriage has become complacent while fantasizing about her ineffectual contractor, the expecting single mom who begins an affair with a man whose girlfriend is pregnant by the same donor’s sperm while trying to figure out how she will afford motherhood, both financially and emotionally. In the book’s eponymous story, a college student sells her “Ivy League” eggs to a celebrity, and — though she first ridicules the elitist marketing and overt capitalism of the reproductive economy — her roommate encourages her to see this act as not one defined by commerce but by “radical empathy,” “the longing for children elemental, like the desire for sight.” 

A testament to her keen vision, Romm’s critique of “radical empathy” salvages authentic meaning from the self-serving banalities of therapy speak. We have children because we want them; we foist life on them, though we don’t understand our own lives, hoping their existence will provide a cipher to ours. And yet — it is radical, isn’t it, to love the future so much that we manifest new beings from nothing but our aging bodies that we imagine the next generation’s memories and collapse time into a perpetual present? Romm’s stories perch on the ledge of the moment, vibrant as photographs where “we’re all of us smeary with movement, with what is about to occur.” 

Robin Romm is the author of two short story collections, The Mother Garden, and Radical Empathy; a chapbook of stories, The Tilt; as well as a memoir, The Mercy Papers (a New York Times Notable Book). She also compiled and edited the essay collection, Double Bind: Women on Ambition. She’s been awarded an O’Henry Prize in short fiction, and was a finalist for the Pen USA prize for her first collection. Her journalism and nonfiction writing have appeared in The Atlantic, The New York Times, Wired, O Magazine, Parents, and Slate. She lives in Portland, Oregon, with her partner, the writer Don Waters, and their two spitfire daughters.