Use Me

by Elissa Schappell

The exquisitely artful fiction debut of Vanity Fair columnist Elissa Schappell is a novel told in ten stories that resonate with the most profound experiences in the life of a young woman -- friendship and rivalry, the love for a man, the birth of a child, and the death of a father.

Genres: Fiction, Short Stories, Literary Fiction, Contemporary, Novels, The United States Of America, Modern

340 pages, Kindle Edition

First published March 1, 2000

Reviews

[J.L. Sutton · Rating 4 out of 5]

Billed as a novel in 10 stories, Elissa Schappell’s Use Me is a collection of linked short stories that follow Evie Wakefield from her adolescent sexual awakening through friendships, marriage, motherhood and the end of her father’s long fight with cancer. The reader witnesses life unfolding in these beautifully written snapshots that are both intimate and raw. Even though the stories are firmly rooted in time and place (beginning in the suburbs in the 1970s), there is a feeling of timelessness in this unfolding. Some of the stories resonate more than others, but they are all solid and move the narrative (Evie’s life) forward even if all the action after her father's death seems suffocating. Poignant and engaging!



Picture with Elissa Schappell at Sheridan College, September 19, 2019. Wonderful to have Elissa do a reading in Wyoming!

[reading is my hustle]

I was excited to hear that Elissa Schappell had a book out because I am a fan of her work in Vanity Fair. Also, I like books that have short stories or vignettes that link together: Girl in Hyacinth Blue or The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing. But this set of linked stories did not work as well for me . Much of the material felt contrived and gratuitous: the rebellion, the multiple abortions, even the father's cancer. I just felt like a voyeur. .

Elissa Schappell sure can write though.

[Ileana · Rating 5 out of 5]

Here's what's up: it actually kind of hurts to mark this book as "finished"! That's how much I loved it. Her characters don't suffer from contrived neuroses (I'm looking at you, Best New American Voices!), but they don't lie flat on the page either. Schappell writes deliciously intimate and truly inspiring, organic, non-gimmicky, non-cliche stories about cool, fun, complex women, and I adore her for this. Like with her other book, Blueprints for Building Better Girls, I'm left like a little kid wishing she would tell me just one more story before she goes... *sigh* I'll definitely be reading this one again and following this author for a long time.

[Treena Thibodeau · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of those books that no one has read; Elissa Schappell has a precision of language that is humbling and inspiring.

[A. Stoddard · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️/5

Review:
I was through the roof to get my hands on another set of linked stories/vignettes by Elissa Schappell. I find strength and peace through her tales of adolescence and navigating through growth as we enter each phase of our lives. From a child to a young woman all the way through marriage and parent hood.
She truly depicts intangible intimacy through the life of a fun, complicated and growing woman. Unsettling, earth shattering, Heart breaking & revitalizing are just a few words that come to mind when racing through every experience I was guided through with every sentence, I found my self never feeling satisfied with the stories ending. Because I wish it wasn’t ending!

Life so often will drag us around and decide everything right down to what defines us whether that be trauma, mental health or the experiences we can’t outrun. Elissa beautifully describes the urgency and relativity of navigating through connections we yearn to have and feel normal but seem blocked from.

I don’t think I will ever have enough of her stories, actually It is very likely it won’t be enough because I will be forever searching for more of her works, more of her tales and feeling empowered as a woman through her strength on these pen dripped lines!

[Jane · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found this book intriguing. Read it because of great reviews by Rick Moody and Jennifer Egan. Found it heartbreaking, funny, unsettling. Then at the end, the last two linked stories, I wept uncontrollably. Parent deat, likely to cause the crying right now. I've read four novels which are linked stories. My book club argues that these are not true novels. I say that definitions continue to evolve. They satisfy me in much the same way that novels do, and that short stories don't. The main character, Evie, seems utterly real to me, and flawed the way real people are. I loved this book on the sentence level. Listen to this: Our mom wanted to be theperfectparent. Our dad figured he was...The day he came back from the hospital I had started trying to memorize my father. His forward leaning walk, the way he stood on one leg when he brushed his teeth, the way he bounced on the balls of his feet to "Brown Sugar," the way he would hold my face in his hands and kiss me. I wanted to build him inside of me, so I could never forget him." Okay is that wonderful or what?

[Swaps55 · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book follows a format that I think is very popular with college/masters students, but is not as often seen in popular fiction and is extremely difficult to do well. Well, she doesn't just do it well, she does it very well, and as a result this should be required reading for anyone attempting it.

This book is a series of linked short stories, along the lines of Davis Sedaris and Laurie Notaro. But this is fiction, not creative non-fiction, and I just don't think you see this as often in fiction. I read the book in the first place because the author came to speak at my college, and I thought the reading she gave from it was so damn clever, and she was so damn impressive that it simply had to be read.

The characters are complex, and as you watch them at these different points in your life, the entire pitcture slowly falls into place. It's definitely a good read, and different enough to feel like you've just splashed your face with water.

[Katie B-K · Rating 4 out of 5]

So. I'm not typically a fan of short story collections, but I wouldn't call this a short story collection. I would characterize it more as a series of vignettes about one person's life told through stories that don't always have that person narrating. From a structure perspective, I found it really interesting and incredibly well done.

The story itself and the themes I also enjoyed and found thought-provoking. Are all of a heterosexual woman's relationships with men defined by her father? What does it mean to love someone who is going to die for decades? How much of our lives is made up of choices and how much happens to us? Fascinating stuff.

My only real concern: I'm not sure I like the protagonist, at all, and the telling of the story in vignettes made it sometimes hard to really understand her motivations, not to mention the motivations of all the secondary characters.

[Don · Rating 3 out of 5]

There are so many great scenes in this novel -- strange, freaky, refreshing moments. And yet the novel as a whole fails. There are a couple of diversions -- namely, the Mary Beth chapters -- that are at times very interesting but do nothing to further the story. And Evie's father isn't developed very well, which becomes a pretty big problem later in the book. Consequently, "Use Me" often feels like an unedited manuscript, a quite impressive, at times dazzling manuscript, but one that needs to be tightened and focused. Nonetheless, I'm excited to read Schappell's subsequent works. "Use Me" was her first book, and, based on the promise she showed here, I'd be surprised if she hasn't developed into a fine storyteller.

[Kelly · Rating 4 out of 5]

Published in 2001, this book is even more urgent and more relevant than ever. It's also incredibly well-written:

"My little sister is eating a yellow pear out of a handkerchief. My mother says that's how the French eat them. Their skins are so soft they bruise brown when you touch them and rip open so easily they nearly dissolve in your mouth. Big deal. All I know is Dee is getting the whole backseat sticky and drawing flies. As far as I can tell, anything good draws flies."

Right?!

[Jen · Rating 2 out of 5]

The stories themselves are uneven, and the subject matter sometimes borders on grotesque, with a woman drinking her own breastmilk—there might be an argument for someone doing such a thing, but the author seems to approach such subjects with adolescent relish. All that being said, there were a couple stories that offered redemption.

[Lori · Rating 4 out of 5]

A collection of interconnected short stories about Evie and Mary Beth, two Gen X women from privileged East Coast (Manhattan and suburban Delaware) backgrounds, as they navigate adolescence and early adulthood. The first half was an unsentimental, razor-sharp romp through France, Amsterdam, NYC, and the vagaries of sex, men, independence, and familial dynamics. Unfortunately I think the author sort of lost the plot after Evie's died and became stuck in a morass of grief that just grew tiresome.

[Constantina · Rating 4 out of 5]

(3.5/5)

This book baffled me, in a very good way.
One can witness a variety of feelings and thoughts from the main heroines, from adolescence to adulthood.

Big minus in my opinion: The focus should have been split equally between Eve and Mary Beth, like 50-50% chapter dedication between them. Giving Mary Beth's story from a further aspect as the book progressed was a no from me.

[Melissa Francis · Rating 1 out of 5]

It porb too me a third of the book to realize how the two girls lives were relevant to each other and then the book just became about the one girl. Her life was too obsessive and the entire outline chapter really bothered me the way I was formatted. No real ending either

[Ploni Almoni · Rating 3 out of 5]

Quite well written. Bit slow and draggy. But easy read, I’d be up for more.

[behsforensics]

Look at To Smoke Perchance To Dream
Schappell, Elissa

[Alice Urchin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Really, I'd give this 3.5 stars. As a whole, I liked the book a lot. The writing was funny but also handled tragedy well. It reminded me of Lorrie Moore's style. There were a lot of witty one-liners that kept me wanting to keep reading. I have two complaints: There were parts of this book that I got really bored with. I felt that a lot of the narrator's depression over her father's illness and then death were overstated and began to come off as whiney and overly dramatic. She mourns his death for *years* and talks about it nonstop, but she doesn't seem to be particularly close with him before he gets cancer or even while he has cancer. Eventually, I started losing sympathy for her and just getting annoyed (much like many the other characters in the book seemed to). It started to feel like she wasn't even trying to accept her dad's death and that she was just wallowing in self-pity. That being said, I was overjoyed that she finally let that go at the end, and I really liked how the revelation of the kiss between her friend and her father kicked that off. My other complaint is that parts of the book just seemed sloppy or out of place. I felt like it could've used at least one more round of editing. I'm still not totally convinced that "Eau-de-Vie," "Novice Bitch," and "Use Me" (which is especially strange since the book takes its title from "Use Me") fit with the larger theme of the book, but I did think that they were enjoyable on their own. Also, a few lines and details didn't really make sense to me or just seemed like they could've been executed better. For example, in "Try an Outline," I have read the line "Wonder how anyone in the world can stand you, forget about like you," about 15 times, and I still don't know what to make of it. I'm not sure if it's just a typo that someone didn't catch or if it's just so awkwardly phrased that it's hard to make sense of.

[Danielle Mebert · Rating 3 out of 5]

This one started out strongly, but my interest waned in the end. The format was interesting, as if a novel unfolded in the form of little vignettes or short novellas. The crux of the book is how a daughter grapples with the slow death of her father. The thing that bothered me most about this book was the the protagonist is a weak, often joyless woman.

Unlike "Still Alice" in which a woman's decline is so fast the reader wants to slow it down and prolong the inevitable, Evie's father's death is long and it feels as if she's worrying since childhood about his death from cancer.

I could have given this book four stars if the story ended a in the year after his death. Because it goes on to the three years after and painfully seems to connect Evie's inability to stop breastfeeding her three year old son to her longing and mourning of her father, yes, I deducted a whole star. She acknowledges that this proximity to her son is detrimental to her marriage and that she's shortchanging her daughter but makes excuses why she can't stop. She acknowledges that her husband was Super Dad/Spouse after the death of her father and her episode of drinking Dewar's in the tub, getting fat, and forgetting to change clothing. It became hard to feel badly for a character mired in grief who seemed to want to stay that way. The relationship with her toddler son was also weird:

"I won't ever let you go, never, ever."
"How many women will you kiss? How many hearts will you break? Will they pick up your socks fro you? Will they feed you?"
"I smell my milk on his breath. I taste it on his lips when I kiss him. It's sweet like almonds and vanilla. It's wrong, I know that, kissing him like that on his lips, but he likes it. I like it."

You can thank me for leaving out the part where Evie suckles from her own breast...

[Rashmi Tiwari · Rating 3 out of 5]

I love Elissa Schappell. I love that she gets the minutiae in life that so often dictates who we are and how we act with one another. In her hands, a scene where a girl is feeling bold and sassy and newly sexually desirable builds in tension until it collapses gently into the humiliation that so many bold, sassy girls experience when they are first feeling out sexual relationships. She is a kind but unsparing chronicler of what it means to be a woman when the world is sort of set up to go against and challenge you at every turn.

I liked this collection of stories because it is seriously well-written and the stories inexplicably feel like they add up to a complete portrait without feeling like a traditional novel, which is a feat to pull off. Weirdly, though, I didn't want to hear about the main character, Evie, as much as I wanted to know more about Mary Beth, her best friend. Evie was almost too much a girl I already knew: white, privileged, with daddy issues, struggling to find her way as an adult after a coddled childhood. I know that story. We all do.

[Mary · Rating 4 out of 5]

Recommended to: all women who grew up in the US middle class in the 70's and went to east-coast colleges in the 80's and who lost their fathers or worried about losing their fathers.

This book is very nearly perfect, for me, anyway. I don't give it the 5th star because it is so specifically perfect for a certain population. I don't care what others think of it though because I am in that certain population. Reading this was like reading the memoirs of your girlhood or college best friend because you know her so well that her memories and family stories have become mixed up with your own and you have a hard time separating yourself from what you are reading. I laughed, I gasped, I cried (the "have to get in the shower" bawling), and I occasionally muttered "TMI!" but when it was over I cried again because it was so perfect.

[Zach · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a remarkable book, a novel told in ten stories. I'll comment on only the one, most striking thing about it. Towards the end, in several of the last few stories, the narrator is forced to deal with the death of a loved one. I have never read anything that advanced as many new and original thoughts on that subject as does this book. Schappell possesses a depth of understanding, an uncanny dissection of the grieving process. She notices ways in which her narrator grieves that a normal human being (i.e. a mere mortal, for surely Schappell is somehow from a higher plane, because how else could she know all this?) would never think of. I was repeatedly stunned at the depth of the insight, and for those chapters alone this book is worth reading.

[Linda · Rating 4 out of 5]

I loved this book! The reviews described it as interconnecting short stories, but after about the first 4 stories, it was all about the one girl/woman and her relationship with her father, who battles lung cancer for 14 years. The other girl/woman featured in the first couple of stories, fades into the background, but is sort of a peripheral character, as the main girl's friend. So for the first half of the book, I kept expecting to hear the other girl's voice again, but it never happened--very disconcerting, but the writing style and the story kept me so engrossed, I stopped caring and got over it. I just started reading a book of the author's short stories called "Blueprints for Building Better Girls", and I'm really enjoying it.

[Blao · Rating 3 out of 5]

Intriguing in a voyeuristic kind of way. I enjoyed Schappell's daring to 'go there' in a few of the stories- I read the unabashed sexual and behavioral deviance as a more or less powerful feminist trope. Then again, Evie's relationship to various members of her family often teeters between irritatingly self-centered and downright creepy. Her character doesn't really grow, inspiring me to furrow my brow and say "hmm" as I finished the last sentence and shut the book.

I give it a three because of the deliciousness of the first two stories, which introduce Evie and Mary Beth respectively. In the end, I wish Use Me were a book of edgy, unrelated American upper-middle class growing-girl stories.

[Carla Hunnicutt · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a novel structured as interwoven short stories about two women who become friends in college, and it ultimately turns into a novel about a woman coming to terms with her relationship with her dying father. The book opens with a story about each woman as a teenager and their relationships with their parents, then we get a story about the two of them as college roommates. After that the stories focus more on the woman who has always been daddy's girl, and now daddy is dying. The Electra complex/dying father theme doesn't engage me, which is the only reason I give it 3 stars instead of 4. The beginning stories are much more compelling, full of dark humor and some sadness.

[Emily · Rating 3 out of 5]

I couldn't get Schappell's most recent book at the library, so settled for the next best thing; previous works but maybe not as highly acclaimed works! I enjoyed this book. Great writer, interesting and thoughtful analysis on a father/daughter dynamic. The chapters about her father's cancer really hit home for me, as I had been through that a couple of years ago. The characters, other than the father, were a little bit despicable and could have benefited from oodles of therapy, but all to make it more enjoyable to read. It lost me a little bit by the last chapter - the whole breast feedings shananigans. But overall I am looking forward to Building Better Girls.

[Alissa · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really wanted to like this book, as:

1.) The author (Elissa Schappell) and I have almost the same exact name--both first and last.

2.) Author Jerry Stahl told me that the author is a fantastic writer.

3.) The protagonist's best friend is named Mary Beth, as is mine in real life.

4.) The protagonist has a mother with breast cancer, as did my mother.

However, I just could not bring myself to finish this book. Maybe it was too close to home. The writing was great but I could not get myself to read to the end.

[Chris Laskey · Rating 4 out of 5]

2nd Read. A series of short stories that are linked by the families and characters history. I am inclined to say that most of the stories have an element of reality behind them - the emotional events are quite vivid and real. It must have been wrenching for the author because it sure overwhelmed me at times with emotion. I especially liked that Evie was complex - having multiple feelings, love , anger, ego and guilt all at the same time ping ponging off each other as the tales progress into her history. A very personal work that's for sure.

[Bridget · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this book in my early 20s and loved it. I decided to revisit it now in my mid 30s and with a new collection of the author's coming out, and was struck with how much it meant to me. I just experienced a loss of both my parents and had forgotten what a big role Evie's Dad and his illness plays in the book, needless to say, I loved it even more. Her self examination and ability to convey such big things in various situations while making it uniquely female is amazing. Can't wait to revisit again in another 10 years....

[Nicole · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm generally not a short story person, so this may be biased, but even though the stories were some what interconnected, I never got invovlved. I would read one sotry, and then the book sat on my nightstand for weeks while I'd whip through other books.

Both the writing and the subject matter worked if you're into chick lit that is. But the short stories never give me enough to sink my teeth into and feel fulfilled.

[Iris · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was just OK in my opinion. The characters were vivid and believable to some degree. However, I didn't feel that Evie was all that likable, and since the story is centered primarily around her and her father's death I suppose I didn't find the story very likable either. I did like the arrangement, and the short story format... and the book was well written. With that in mind, I will look forward to reading Schappell's second book soon!