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Driving in Cars with Homeless Men: Stories

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Driving in Cars with Homeless Men is a love letter to women moving through violence, set in the streets and the bars, the old homes, the tiny apartments, and the landscape of a working-class Boston. Serena, Frankie, Raffa, and Nat collide and break apart like pool balls to come back together in an imagined post-divorce future. Through the gritty, unraveling truths of their lives, they find themselves in the bed of an overdosed lover, through the panting tongue of a rescue dog who is equally as dislanguaged as his owner, in the studio apartment of a compulsive liar, sitting backward but going forward in the galley of an airplane, in relationships that are at once playgrounds and cages. Homeless Men is the collective story of women whose lives careen back into the past, to the places where pain lurks and haunts. With riotous energy and rage, they run towards the future in the hopes of untangling themselves from failure to succeed and fail again.
 

185 pages, Hardcover

First published October 1, 2019

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711 people want to read

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Kate Wisel

3 books29 followers

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5 stars
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Displaying 1 - 23 of 23 reviews
Profile Image for Alan.
Author 15 books191 followers
September 10, 2020
Right from the first sentence 'When the cops came, they came to find us' I was with this scintillating group of linked short stories and flash covering the teenage-and-twenties lives of four working class women in Boston. The stories are brilliantly written but harder than nails in the sense that they cover abusive relationships, drugs, self harm etc. I do read many similar fictions but even I was wincing at some of this. Not for the squeamish then, but for those who don't like their punches pulled this is an exceptional book.
Profile Image for Kathleen.
Author 35 books1,359 followers
October 4, 2019
My review for the Chicago Tribune: https://www.chicagotribune.com/entert...

To call a short story collection “gritty” — as in having strong qualities of tough uncompromising realism — is a bit commonplace, but Kate Wisel’s debut, “Driving in Cars With Homeless Men,” is gritty in the best sense. These 20 linked short stories — some of them very short — offer up hard granules of truth about contemporary women contending with dispossession, oppression and violence.

By focusing on the lives and friendships of four main characters living in working-class Boston, as Wisel depicts the overlapping struggles of Serena, Frankie, Raffa and Natalya, so too does she reveal bigger realities about substance abuse, family, anger and hope.

“Driving in Cars With Homeless Men” won the Drue Heinz Literature Prize, given annually for a collection of short fiction and accompanied by a $15,000 cash award and publication by University of Pittsburgh Press. Contest judge Min Jin Lee (whose novel “Pachinko” was a National Book Award finalist) selected Wisel’s manuscript from over 530 entries. In praising it, she wrote “You can hear the crackle of heat and the roar of a powerful fire burning through these pages.” You certainly can, as when Serena, awaiting her turn in court over charges against an abusive boyfriend, observes, “The men received all the attention, so much emphasis on their situations, whereas when we women were finally called to the stand, one by one, we were asked, one hand raised to God, if we’d like to proceed with the case we had initiated. And then we were dismissed. Not a woman proceeded.”

A native of Boston, Wisel earned her master of fine arts from Columbia College-Chicago and was a creative writing fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. As a long-time assistant to music critic Jim DeRogatis, she worked on research for DeRogatis’ recently released book, “Soulless: The Case Against R. Kelly.”

With a knowing and experienced eye, Wisel describes the down-and-out milieus of her protagonists in wry but never condescending detail. Serena and Frankie, for instance, “live together in a two-bedroom split above Sal’s Pizza, where the dopeheads blabber beneath our open windows at night” and there are “jellied condoms lying shriveled in the cracks” near the “Methadone clinic by Packard’s Corner, where beyond the parking lot the registered sex offenders live in tighter and tighter clusters of red dots like the clap.” Natalya, originally from Ukraine, sits on Dot Ave (Dorchester Avenue) “freezing in nothing but jeans and a hoodie, afraid to waste gas …. Sore as her broken rib” until “(f)or a second, Nat is Boston, ancient and tense.”

Wisel makes scintillating use of the flash fiction form, starting off with the propulsive first-person plural, “Us,” to establish the bonds among the young women, concluding: “There was nowhere to sit, so we sat on the rocks, the bright blue thirties, each other. We were skin-close to the sky. Our cheeks against that torn black sheet.” Subsequently interspersing such extremely brief stories as “How I Dance,” “California,” and “Shelley Beneath Us” amid the more traditional-length stories lets her heighten the sweep and intensity of the book’s ongoing dramas. Each tiny piece shines like a shard in the larger mosaic Wisel is assembling.

Unpleasant as the situations her female characters endure, Wisel illuminates the overall darkness with bursts of wit and humor, as when a young woman in a troubled relationship with a pretentious and controlling boyfriend observes of his ordering aioli in a restaurant: “I was impressed, though later I learned the sauce is just mayonnaise that went to college.” In a court-mandated driving class, Raffa thinks of the instructor that he looks “like he’s only ever read a book on the toilet.”

Wisel draws her epigraph for the book from the Irish writer Kevin Barry’s “Last Days of the Buffalo”: “But the way it happens sometimes is that pain becomes a feed for courage, a nutrient for it: when pain drips steadily, it can embolden.” In “Driving in Cars With Homeless Men,” amid the pain they suffer, the compassion the four women show each other emerges as the brightest light in any of their lives; as Natalya thinks, “The thing about being ghetto is that toughness is a kind of love.”
Profile Image for Annie.
95 reviews13 followers
November 3, 2020
Wisel's short story collection was picked up by me from word of mouth. From the first page I knew I liked where it was going. The book just lightly touches on four women and some of their dark circumstances.

Later into the book I found myself wanting to know "what happens next?" on some of the abrupt endings to some of the short stories. A perspective of a character was developing and then suddenly it ended. Often tragically. I found myself not able to accept those endings. Not because they were not good, but because I found them to make me lose trust in where the stories were going. Was I always going to get eagerly involved in the character only to be let down with another abrupt ending?

Wisel has a multitude of good sentences and good observations of female characters and their allegiances to one another, but I did find myself discouraged towards the end since I felt like there was not real resolve to some of the stories.
Profile Image for Becky Mandelbaum.
Author 8 books144 followers
October 11, 2019
The sentences in this collection are explosive, like nothing else I've ever read, and the four main characters --Frankie, Raffa, Natalya, and Serena -- will break your heart, make you want to hug them, make you want to have a beer with them, make you want to pull them from their story and onto safer ground. They take care of each other, fuck up, eat some Doritos, repeat. They travel through Boston on hyperdrive, simultaneously aware of and oblivious to just how much the city is part of their story, for better and worse. If you're looking for an honest depiction of young women and friendship, read this book now.
Profile Image for Jen.
253 reviews14 followers
February 1, 2020
Sometimes a book jumps off the shelf and begs to be read. This is precisely what happened to me with Kate Wisel's Driving in Cars with Homeless Men. I picked it up off a brand new cart of books because the title was intriguing, and the premise even more so. Short stories? Check! Female author? Check! Stories that interconnect and have recurring characters? Check! Wisel's Boston is gritty and real, her prose is captivating, and her cast of female characters and their losses, hardships, and loneliness will stay will me for a long time. Each story is a sudden drop into a vignette from the character's life, whether past, present or future.
Profile Image for Lisa.
629 reviews51 followers
August 27, 2019
I thought this was a terrific debut. Not for everyone though—along with the usual caveat for those of you who don't like short fiction (although the stories are strongly linked), there's a lot of alcohol and drug use, family and relationship dysfunction, and a fair amount of violence. That said, it's really stunning. The book follows four young women growing up in Boston, jumping around in time from childhood to young adulthood. They all hail from situations that now would be politely termed "underserved," but these girls are definitely underserved by the world at large, their families (which is to say mothers, as fathers are hardly in the picture)—everyone but each other, and they love each other fiercely while being unable to actually help each other in any way.

I know "incandescent" is totally overused in reviews, but this collection absolutely burns with a hot blue flame—of rage, loyalty, and a kind of unrequited self-love, and the anger that comes with not having enough of what you need and too much of what you don't want. The writing is dense and beautiful, and the pacing is sharply self-aware—just when you think you've had too much of these young women's misery, some light and pleasure flares... although never too much, and never enough really. It's a rough ride, but a worthwhile one if you're up for it.
Profile Image for Lucy Tan.
Author 2 books225 followers
October 2, 2019
Enter Boston as it belongs to a tribe of young women hovering on the edge of disaster. Nothing is coming to save Serena, Frankie, Raffa and Natalya but themselves. And so we witness their tenacity and grit, their loss, their mapping of escape routes, and their surrenders to love, the cost of which is higher than you can imagine. These stories are visceral and intelligent, irreverent and tender. Kate Wisel writes with originality and ferocity of language, honoring both the power of transformation through pain and the live-or-die necessity of female friendships. This is a necessary book, and Wisel’s voice is one of the fiercest I’ve ever read.
Profile Image for Kathie Giorgio.
Author 23 books81 followers
October 28, 2019
I really wanted to like this book. I love the title. I love the genre. And the Drue Heinz is a great prize to win. For the most part, the writing here was crisp and original and the storylines were thoughtful and complex. Which makes for a great recipe.

But the endings just weren't there. This was one of those collections where the endings are all left dangling. It's as if the story just stops because the writer can't decide what will happen next, and so she moseys on to the next story. It left the experience unsatisfying.

Ah, well, It was a good try. So much potential. I'll be watching for this author's next book, to see what improvement there is.
Profile Image for Mj.
15 reviews1 follower
November 27, 2023
got a goodreads just to review this book...

4/5

definitely up my alley like 100%, alleyways and broken glass and really strange men. set in boston but felt so much like all my childhoods in one. kate wisel's prose is just so awesome. the way she ties language in with like what the stories about is absolutely fire. no other way to describe it sorry. there will be a rhythm to it, a tension built in the imagery, and its always a reflection of the particular perspective we're in.

raffa's stories were the absolute STANDOUTS of this collection. "Benny's Bed" is maybe my favourite story of all time of forever. made me want to email wisel like 'yo this is like the height of storytelling'. it's so so good. after "Benny's Bed," each allusion to it was a direct hit to the gut. and raffa's conclusion was so beautiful. she was really just the standout character, her complexity, her impulsivity, i LOVE to see it in women characters.

"Stage Four" which is RIGHT BEFORE "Benny's Bed," is the worst story in literally the entire book. this almost feels on purpose with how in contrast the whole second half of the book compares to the first half. "Stage Four" is such a drag it was such a chore to get through that story. i really just hated it beginning to end and wanted all the characters to stop talking so i could move to the next one.

even with that little stinker of a story, the collection in general is well put together. each story builds off of each other. the separation of stories being put under certain characters, and establishing all of these characters as having interacted with each other before and LIVED together before is DELICIOUS!!!!!!! i love how self contained this world is, how much that accurately reflects how much poverty is a cycle that encompasses so much more than just living in shitty apartments and eating ramen. it effects your friendships, your relationships to substances, your relationships and who you seek out romantically. natalya's stories were gut wrenching. it grabs something deep and captures that rock bottom that you don't even realize is rock bottom. that can be said about so many stories in this collection.

at the very least, read it for "Benny's Bed". so gas.
Profile Image for Rachel Swearingen.
Author 3 books51 followers
October 8, 2020
I read Kate Wisel's Driving in Cars with Homeless Men a few weeks ago and have been thinking about the four women who live in its prose ever since. The attention Wisel gives her characters is so unique. What I love about these stories is how the reader's eye is directed to all these seemingly tiny details that glimmer throughout these stories, and give you a sense of working class Boston and of the seemingly invisible lives of young women there. One detail that seemed incidental to me at first, but has stayed with me, is the description of blue salt on blacktop in the winter-something both pretty and necessary and caustic. There's grittiness here, and often a grayness that speaks to an at times overwhelming oppression in these young women's lives, but then moments of such brightness and brilliance. These women are working class and a few are second generation, and all four are smart in different ways. These stories are even more about the larger systems at work in women's lives, and the small moments of failure and triumph.

When I try to describe the shape of this book I think of a shattered mirror, its shards reflecting the characters back at themselves and each other. The first story, a flash piece, gives us a communal feel for an almost singular voice of these girls, but then we get glimpses of other moments in their lives, as they live separately or with each other, or nurse their private wounds. The secondary characters, mothers, bosses, friends, the "homeless" man who provides a different sort of home and anchoring for one of the characters, are wonderful. Kate Wisel writes with such empathy, but she doesn't look away either. I cannot wait to read her next book.
Profile Image for Andy Kristensen.
229 reviews8 followers
August 8, 2020
There’s a song called “After the Party” by a band called The Menzingers. Arguably the most underrated punk/emo track of the last decade, the song is about a working class couple who lives life day by day, struggling to get by and survive and keep loving one another. The music video of it is just as bleak and hopeful as the song is, and it’s one of my all-time favorites- it captures the grit and scenery of a life lived at the margins of society, of working a low-paying hourly job, of struggling to survive paycheck by paycheck but doing it with someone you love.
I’ve struggled to find art that replicates the beauty of that song. This collection does exactly that. As I read through the stories, I was left wondering how Wisel was able to conjure up such strong images of a working class life, along with enough witty one liners and metaphors to fill an entire poetry collection with on their own, and I was blown away by the simple complexity of each and every short story of the collection. Hands down the best short story collection I’ve read in years.
Profile Image for Steve Brock.
654 reviews67 followers
January 2, 2020
This book was a Best of the Best for the month of January 2020, as selected by Stevo's Book Reviews on the Internet / Stevo's Nobel Ideas. You can find me at http://forums.delphiforums.com/stevo1, on my Stevo's Novel Ideas Amazon Influencer page (https://www.amazon.com/shop/stevo4747), on Twitter (https://twitter.com/Stevo4747), on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/brocksteve/) or search for me on Google for many more reviews and recommendations.
Profile Image for Dom Jones.
98 reviews
September 29, 2023
At times hard to follow with characters merging, but many beautiful moments - Serena and Frankie’s experiences in particular.

Very complex characters with complicated reactions to the trauma they face.

Tragic and bleak, but with bright beams of light and hope fighting through.

“So much of being a mother was coping with the long spouts of boredom that were punctuated by seconds of ache so pure they could shatter your rib cage if you weren’t breathing right”
Profile Image for Angela Boyd.
185 reviews6 followers
October 20, 2019
I want to write the most thoughtful review ever, but for now I will just say please read this novel-in-stories, where we meet four friends in working-class Boston as girls and see moments of their lives as they become women, as they come together and break apart again. It is beautiful - the details, the voice! - but also full of rage.
Profile Image for Torimac.
385 reviews8 followers
January 4, 2021
Ok - dnf! But I’m DONE with it unless I change my mind. I like the premise but I’ve read lots of books that gripped my interest so much better than this one. Maybe I’m just not in the mood but I’m also not in the mood for Euphoria (film series) and I think they require the same mood.
Profile Image for Addison.
41 reviews
August 30, 2025
A collection of interlocking stories that read like prose poetry. They explore what it means to be hurting and in love and alive and confused and cold and hungry with Boston as the backdrop. Very sad and heavy.
Profile Image for Emma.
11 reviews
March 14, 2020
Wisel’s writing style is out of the norm for what I usually read, but it’s so gripping. Everything felt very punctuated. Loved this emotional departure from the typical.
470 reviews1 follower
March 20, 2021
While the writing was excellent, I'm not a great fan of the loosely connected short story format so this was not my cup of tea. The stories were too disjointed for me.
Profile Image for Kirsten.
60 reviews
December 25, 2021
4.5, some parts were a bit hard to follow but I felt for these four girls and it’s crazy how the relationships in our lives transform every other aspect of our lives
Profile Image for Summ..
62 reviews1 follower
September 10, 2022
I can't decide if I should rate this three or four stars, so let's just say my official rating is 2.4, yeah?

I wrote this long review, and now rereading it, I don't like how critical and lame my it was... But I did actually like this book a tiny bit more than disliked it... Although, I'd definitely say I'm coming to terms with the fact that I'm not really a big fan of short stories, lol.

So, if you're into upfront non-sugar-coated short stories centered around the life experiences of four woman dealing with their own life trials (and whose few safe places are with each other, for the most part), you'd probably like to read this. It's also not too long, told in slices of life, and very blunt/to the point.

I will say, for myself, that I hope there's actual endings for her future projects, because I'm not a fan of that disappointment I feel when reading a book and having it end abruptly, with every thread loose.

(And I forget that this book is a collection of short stories, and wasn't really written with the intention to leave you feeling satisfied... but I really like closure, I guess.) I kind of think the over-all ending/final story really brought down my liking for this book.

That, and the characters all sounded like the same woman, which also made the water kind of muddy for me while reading more often than not. The stories themselves were pretty alright/good ones to tell, but their voices were... too much of the same to me! (Maybe I was having trouble paying attention, but I even forgot which girl I was reading about a few times, and who was who/who did what.)

But disappointment at the ending or not (again, it's a collection of short stories so I know I'm silly for expecting an ending), I think it was still a decent read! I'll definitely be looking out for whatever future projects Kate Wisel creates next.
84 reviews
October 23, 2020
OCT 2020: 7-8 months later and I still *feel* this story in my body. Not all of it, but a few of the moments linger and draw a physical reaction when I think of them.
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