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No Relation
When Paula first met James, she was 26, in graduate school, and not ready to be any kind of mother to his two young sons. But, years later, after caring for them and watching them grow, she finds herself unsure of what to do when her relationship with their father ends. In a collection of striking flash essays, Paula reveals the complexity of loving children who are not her own and attempts to put language to something we have no language to describe. No Relation is a deeply personal, beautifully rendered account of a seldom-remarked on kind of love and loss.
- GenresMemoir
115 pages, Paperback
First published November 1, 2017
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Displaying 1 - 23 of 23 reviews
June 29, 2022
Super short. Quick to read. Mesmerizing. You will devour this. Small (flash) essays that braid together. Great memoir. About loving children that aren't biologically or legally yours. There's a breakup. Then what happens. Most women have been here. I flashed through this. Loved every minute. I met the author. A kind, understated, loveliest of lovely person. And a great writer. My copy is signed. Recommended to the sky & back. Get it. Read it. Write like that.
February 1, 2018
It’s difficult to put these into boxes. They’re poems and stories and essays and moments. Maybe they’re boxes themselves: each one containing empathy and nostalgia and insight and understanding. So much happens when lives converge. These boxes are very personal and specific, but universal, too. Small and enormous.
February 5, 2018
‘The landing for my next, booted step: a thick red centipede moving slowly across the dirt path.’
Chicago author Paula Carter, with an MFA from Indiana University, Bloomington, has taught writing at Indiana University, University of Kentucky and Concordia University Chicago. She is a weaver of words and emotions. In short essays that seem like pages from a diary she eloquently steps into an arena that few other writers explore – love, loss, struggle, re-orientation – all the manifestations of a broken home.
The little description of the book allows the reader to enter aware of the content – ‘When Paula first met James, she was 26, in graduate school, and not ready to be any kind of mother to his two young sons. But, years later, after caring for them and watching them grow, she finds herself unsure of what to do when her relationship with their father ends. In a collection of striking flash essays, Paula reveals the complexity of loving children who are not her own and attempts to put language to something we have no language to describe.’
But to appreciate the little vignettes that fill this book it is better to sample a few:
FALLING IN LOVE
Caleb and I are sitting on the couch watching TV, when without looking, without thinking, he reaches out and takes hold of my hand. A boy and a grown woman. I don’t look at our hands, or at him, afraid of breaking the spell. It is just as it once was with his hater. The same quickening of my heart, my hand becoming sweaty, except this time it is my hand that covers his small, slim fingers. Has he held hands with other girls? At school, at recess? Or is it just me?
TRUTH
What would James say it he were telling this story? There are moments in life that we remember more clearly than others, like italics on a page. They are signposts that guide us through our own history. I see the cookie dough. I see Lori in a white dress. I see the Pink Lady’s Slippers. What does James see? What are the moments that my mind des not even recall, that he conjures in love and anger and disappointment? There is no truth. Truth is like the silly putty warmed in the sun on Caleb’s windowsill. It will take what ever shape you want to give it.
Words that convey powerful images, striking resemblances to each of our personal experiences – Paula is a conjurer, a very fine writer.
Chicago author Paula Carter, with an MFA from Indiana University, Bloomington, has taught writing at Indiana University, University of Kentucky and Concordia University Chicago. She is a weaver of words and emotions. In short essays that seem like pages from a diary she eloquently steps into an arena that few other writers explore – love, loss, struggle, re-orientation – all the manifestations of a broken home.
The little description of the book allows the reader to enter aware of the content – ‘When Paula first met James, she was 26, in graduate school, and not ready to be any kind of mother to his two young sons. But, years later, after caring for them and watching them grow, she finds herself unsure of what to do when her relationship with their father ends. In a collection of striking flash essays, Paula reveals the complexity of loving children who are not her own and attempts to put language to something we have no language to describe.’
But to appreciate the little vignettes that fill this book it is better to sample a few:
FALLING IN LOVE
Caleb and I are sitting on the couch watching TV, when without looking, without thinking, he reaches out and takes hold of my hand. A boy and a grown woman. I don’t look at our hands, or at him, afraid of breaking the spell. It is just as it once was with his hater. The same quickening of my heart, my hand becoming sweaty, except this time it is my hand that covers his small, slim fingers. Has he held hands with other girls? At school, at recess? Or is it just me?
TRUTH
What would James say it he were telling this story? There are moments in life that we remember more clearly than others, like italics on a page. They are signposts that guide us through our own history. I see the cookie dough. I see Lori in a white dress. I see the Pink Lady’s Slippers. What does James see? What are the moments that my mind des not even recall, that he conjures in love and anger and disappointment? There is no truth. Truth is like the silly putty warmed in the sun on Caleb’s windowsill. It will take what ever shape you want to give it.
Words that convey powerful images, striking resemblances to each of our personal experiences – Paula is a conjurer, a very fine writer.
June 14, 2020
My niece Poulami read this memoir in a writing class in college. It was important to her in thinking about her own writing. I was happy to read it when she gave me copy for my birthday this year. Although I have read some short short fiction (Lydia Davis, Can't, Won't), this was my first encounter with the flash essay format. Each essay is very short, from a paragraph to a page and a half. Each one is beautifully crafted, and each one packs a punch, often in the last line. The titles of the essays are also thoughtful, and occasionally funny in a wry kind of way. The essays read as though every word is carefully chosen in this form that allows nothing extra. The story is about a young woman, out of college only a few years, who falls in love with a somewhat older man. He reveals to her that he has children, two young sons. She moves in with him, and the four of them make a family, although she always feels that the three of them constitute a unit, and she is slightly outside. They are together for several years--it is not clear how long, but she follows him as he moves from one college teaching job to another. The narrator's relationship with the professor does not last, and, when she leaves him, it also alters her relationship with the boys, because, in fact they are, in the words of the title, "no relation." The second part of the book is about her building a life. This takes time, and is multi- directional. It doesn't have the same focus and immediate impact as the first part of the book, but many of the essays stay with me. It becomes an exploration of how women who do not have children "of their own" come to terms with their lives without children. This is all done with a very light touch, and enormous kindness and tenderness. The narrator experiences a real loss, both of the two boys who were not hers, but, over time, also of her hopes for having her own children. Yet the narrator emerges as a person with resilience and agency. We see her making a new life in a new place. Some of the essays were sad and painful to read, yet I felt a kinship with the narrator, and I appreciated her sharing her story.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
March 25, 2018
Riveting storytelling about falling in love, ending a relationship, and a phenomenon that nobody hardly talks about: losing a relationship to your ex-lover's children, who may not be your children in a biological sense, but after years of living together are not not in some way your children either. Carter describes this better than I do. She's a master in the form of brief micro-essays that are charged with energy and building toward something bigger than its parts. She's excellent at the level of sharp sensory details: two small boys who smell like "milk and cotton and sleep and dirty feet."
November 28, 2017
Full disclosure: I know the author personally. That said, this is a lovely, understated introduction to flash nonfiction/memoir, a genre I wasn't very familiar with. It's also a sensitive and personal exploration into a type of relationship for which we don't have adequate language. Read it to feel warm and wistful.
January 2, 2021
Strong reflection on (step)parenting, love, loss and maturing. Written in flash essayette form. Quick, profound, poetic. Painful and honest.
January 25, 2018
I greatly admire Paula Carter's candor and compression. As a flash author myself, I understand how challenging (and fulfilling) it can be to create such beautiful and meaningful expression from complex situations. Each of these pieces stands on its own as an evocative work of art as well as working with each other to tell the tale of what it's like to care deeply for children not one's own and yet, through bonds and time, still one's own. I will recommend this book to my students as a study of form done well. I will also reread it for its lyrical and personal truth. One of the best books I've read in the past year.
October 22, 2020
Really intentional and well-paced memoir. Extremely fast read. I really enjoyed the shorter “chapter” style used here and found it really poetic, making me hold the images more tenderly and feel the emotion that was never overwritten. Only took off a star because there were certain scenes where I questioned the time they took place in relation to the relatively chronological story where I felt a little disoriented or too distracted by that detail. I am impressed by how much Carter was able to accomplish in such relatively small space and am satisfied, though curious at what the expansion of certain moments might be. Definite recommend!
July 17, 2023
This book was a gift from a friend, and it brought me a lot of joy -- though its subject matter is far from joyful. The author recounts a relationship with her step children whom she knew as young kids. After she separated from their father, the relationship eventually ended, and the book is dictated by the lingering grief over that ending. It's a memoir in flash fictions that are probably about 100-300 words each. Each story has its own movement, its own characters and development and altogether the book has a very cohesive internal structure, with a very strong arc and denouement. It was so inspiring that I immediately began to draft a memoir in the same vein! :)
September 18, 2023
This was in my TBR for 5 years, and I’m so glad I read it! I had seen it recommended elsewhere, but I can’t remember where. (Spinster? No One Tells You This?) I probably liked this at a 4.5 level, but I’m rounding up *because it exists.* It’s another one of those complicated grief stories—the loss of the kids of your ex-BF. This is just really thoughtfully and genuinely written. I would love to read more from her.
(Fun fact: this book makes passing reference to the book, 27 (wrong) reasons you’re single! So it all comes full circle—though that isn’t the book that initially referenced this book to me.)
(Fun fact: this book makes passing reference to the book, 27 (wrong) reasons you’re single! So it all comes full circle—though that isn’t the book that initially referenced this book to me.)
August 9, 2019
In crisp, probing prose, Carter investigates her past relationship with a man who had children, and who she was in that relationship and to those children. The book reveals the murky waters of step-parenting sometimes comically, and sometimes in ways that make one wince. The longing for the children that were, at least for a time, partly hers conveys the difficulty and suffering of such relationships when they cease. A touching flash memoir with memorable, right prose.
April 22, 2023
A totally moving and original take on step-parenting and intimacy, kept my head and heart locked-in and forever surprised. Carter’s spare fragments felt as vast as landscapes, perhaps even murals. Her attention to detail — particularly the subtle unsaids that pass between children and the adults they love — is equally and devastatingly sharp.
Overall — and I know this is overused — a genuine ‘masterclass’ in flash memoir that packs a world of feeling into each word.
Overall — and I know this is overused — a genuine ‘masterclass’ in flash memoir that packs a world of feeling into each word.
January 24, 2020
I adored this book, read it in one day. It is beautifully written and gives voice to a loss that doesn't have a name--the loss of one's partner's kids. What do you do with this sorrow? I feel like such tangential losses, after a break-up, are hard to talk about, so they often are left unsaid. But they are real and fierce, and I'm glad Carter gave loving voice to them.
May 12, 2023
Heartfelt memoir in micro essays that explores step-parent/step children relations, what is there and what is missing from biological children/parent relationships, and how a divorce affects everyone. How newfound families can sometimes mean more than biological ones. A needed (not evil) step-parent point of view.
December 13, 2017
It's a book that flows seamlessly from one essay to the next. It's a story so tender. I'm so grateful to know the person who wrote it!
December 28, 2017
This is a carefully considered collection of heartbreaking observations.
December 9, 2020
Lovely flash memoir. Some of the essays were breathtaking. Her look at octavia and her discussion of the connections of women are beautiful.
March 15, 2023
Stunning use of flash to tell a moving story.
September 27, 2023
An enjoyable read.
June 22, 2021
Heartbreaking and real. I can relate so acutely to many of the themes here, though my personal ending was different. Blended families are hard, but worth it (I was too young too). My heart goes out to you, Paula!!
December 16, 2017
I'm a friend of the author. This is a beautiful collection of micro-essays about family, love, motherhood, and memory. Each finely-crafted piece reflects the author's tremendous empathy and eye for the tiny, touching details that make up a life. It's also very funny and readable; I found myself racing through the book, and then turning back to re-read my favorite parts as soon as I finished.
Displaying 1 - 23 of 23 reviews