I Want To Know That I Will Be Okay

by Deirdre Sullivan

In this dark, glittering collection of short stories, Deirdre Sullivan explores the trauma and power that reside in women's bodies.

A teenage girl tries to fit in at a party held in a haunted house, with unexpected and disastrous consequences.
A mother and daughter run a thriving online business selling antique dolls, while their customers get more than they bargained for.
And after a stillbirth, a young woman discovers that there is something bizarre and wondrous growing inside of her.

With empathy and invention, Sullivan effortlessly blends genres in stories that are by turns strange and exquisite. Already established as an award-winning writer for children and young adults, I Want to Know That I Will Be Okay marks her arrival as a captivating new voice in literary fiction.

Genres: Short Stories, Audiobook, Fiction, Horror, Book Club, Short Story Collection, Magical Realism

183 pages, Paperback

First published May 13, 2021

About the author

Deirdre Sullivan is a writer from Galway.

Reviews

[Rosamund Taylor · Rating 5 out of 5]

Macabre but tender, I Want To Know That I Will Be Okay is Deirdre Sullivan’s first collection of stories for adults. The fourteen stories in this collection explore women’s lives in modern Ireland, touching on the eldritch at the heart of the ordinary. In her work, women’s bodies become porous places that can be easily violated by the supernatural, or which can be the site of great beauty – sometimes both. Her work deals directly with horror themes, such as in the breathtaking “Little Lives”, in which we meet a mother-daughter team who look after haunted dolls, or “The Host”, in which a young girl visiting an old cottage meets a strange ghost. Other stories touch on the terror of everyday life, such as “Black Spot”, about a dangerous spot on the road where deaths occur, or “Appointment”, in which a woman taking care of her elderly mother feels more and more trapped. These stories allow horror to creep up on the reader: they aren’t grotesque or violent, but explore undercurrents of unbearable but unspoken distress. Using engaging, original prose, Sullivan gets the reader under the skin of her characters and makes us experience their distress with them. But these stories are also redemptive: Sullivan is generous with her characters, placing their autonomy at the centre of each story, and creates a feeling of expansiveness and hope. An imaginative, compelling collection that is hugely original: highly recommended.

[Gabbie Pop · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5/5
PERFECT FOR FANS OF KIRSTY LOGAN, ALI SMITH AND JEN CAMPBELL.
This collection solidifies Sullivan's place as one of the outstanding Irish short story writers of our times. Themes familiar to those who've read Sullivan's previous work seep through, but they are approached quite differently for adult audiences this time. Exploring themes of abjection, alienation, the body, femininity, performativity and much more, this collection is truly fantastic and I cannot recommend it highly enough to short story fanatics (or simply all readers wanting to dip their toes into this genre!).
My personal favourites were the titular short story, LITTLE LIVES, THE MOTHER and A SCREAM AWAY FROM SOMEONE

[Alaleh Arjmandi · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is extremely beautiful, for its delicate details, and so feminine that I would surely recommend every woman to go through it, live in it, and see herself right there, inside each and every story. A brilliant collection of short stories which seems to be dark at first, but so real that each of them reminds us of very familiar moments in daily life.
While reading this book, it was astonishing to understand women share the exact way of thinking, no matter the background. All the cultural, social, religious, etc. diversities haven't been a single barrier, even for a moment, to stop us understand each other; which is amazing.

Deirdre is absolutely a treasure, and I'm quite delighted that I had the chance to read another work from her.

[Eoin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Deirdre Sullivan is an absolute powerhouse of literary talent.

Built like a haunted house of the human experience, Sullivan’s debut book for adults expertly and carefully unlocks each door to reveal stories of trauma, adolescence, anger, womanhood, pregnancy, love, family and fear. With each and every story she delves deeper and deeper into her characters until they’re left completely raw to the reader, their voices ringing through the pages as if they were real people telling their own stories. A collection that perfectly dissects the little horrors of everyday life.

[Celine · Rating 5 out of 5]

Biting. Acute.
So clear eyed that it's almost painful to read.
Highly recommended.

[Isla · Rating 2 out of 5]

thank fuck that’s over. that was so meh and i could truly see the potential of the stories but they were so boring and lacklustre.

[Aoife Cassidy McM · Rating 3 out of 5]

This short story collection by Irish author Deirdre Sullivan has been described as her first book for adults; she has published several YA books to great acclaim. There is a strong leaning towards YA in a lot of these stories.

These are what I’d describe as feminist ghost stories. Quiet and unsettling, there’s a sense that someone is watching over your shoulder when you’re reading them, a sensation I neither enjoyed nor would want to repeat. The language is sensuous and vivid, yet somehow simultaneously grotesque and macabre.

Many of the stories in here made me feel queasy, from the opening story “The Mother”, where a woman contemplates giving birth to an unknown creature, to “Skein”, a tale about a woman and her body hair, culminating in a sebaceous cyst which was like the literary equivalent of watching someone squeeze a pimple.

The stories explore a number of themes: social anxiety features prominently, as does depression, grief and loss in different forms. My favourite story was probably either Black Spot or Missing in the Morning. Little Lives, featuring a mother and daughter who sell antique dolls was full of dark humour but was downright creepy.

It would make an excellent October/Halloween read as it has a dark, disturbed feel to it. I’m going to sit on the fence with my rating: objectively very good but not really my cup of tea. 3/5 ⭐️

[Karina · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dazzling, sharp, painfully tender tales, haunting & terrible. Dark and beautiful, stories that linger on in the mind, in the beat of blood in the veins.

[Sophie · Rating 5 out of 5]

I enjoyed every story and they were very varied in terms of style and content. Think I could've done with a week between each one to process my thoughts and feelings!

[Jess ࣪˖ ִֶཐི༏ཋྀ · Rating 3 out of 5]

2.5? Started off promising and there were so many intriguing premises with potential but something abt the execution really threw me off?

[Áine Ní Néill · Rating 5 out of 5]

Everything that Dee writes is a sort of immaculate monstrosity. Maybe it's beautiful, maybe it's painful, or maybe it's a blend of the two-- tugging on your heartstrings & making you weep and cringe in equal measure. This is not a book to be read lightly. Each story is a new shade of strange, a new way of looking at the macabre, at the distressing, at the real.

It's five stars, as always, but if I could pluck more from the skies & offer them up, I would.

[Liam Maguire · Rating 5 out of 5]

This shit goes hard

[bibamerlo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Most of the stories are quite weird, and few times I was ready to shut the book but something was holding me. One small thought in the back of my mind "maybe you should keep going? Maybe you should try another story?" And that's how I reached to the end of the book and especially two last stories "I want to know that I will be ok" and "Missing in the morning" which I loved enormously!

Deirdre Sullivan is talking about complex, awful, sad moments of our life but without talking about it directly. We, readers, unveil the essence of story bit by bit. The stories are more like "one day of a person's life". No details, no explanation. You can make your conclusion based on small bits Deirdre offers us.
You might be right, but at the same time you might be wrong . Just try to dive deep in the atmosphere she has created in her book and you will get it. Sometimes the shadow of realisation what really happened gave me goosebumps.

I've never read something like that before so that's why I had some struggles in the beginning, but I will definitely reread it in some time.

[Sarah M · Rating 5 out of 5]

Deirdre Sullivan please be my friend

This is just amazing.

I was beginning to think that I didn’t like short story collections and this completely shattered that idea.

Had my attention from start to finish and can we just say

IRISH FICTION!!!!!

[Gareth Osborne · Rating 5 out of 5]

Y’know that feeling you get deep down in your tummy that makes you think that something, somewhere has gone very wrong?

It’s a queasy nausea, tinged with pre-loaded guilt as your brain skitters about trying to understand why it's so unsettled.

And you really need to pee.

That’s exactly the feeling I had from the moment I opened Deirdre Sullivan’s collection of short stories.

It’s a remarkably written anthropomorphic gallimaufry of disturbing feelings and images, many of which are so vaguely defined as to make them even more unsettling.

As we know, the monsters in monster movies are all the scarier if we never get to see them clearly or understand what they want to do to us.

No one in this collection of short stories is okay.

I’m not okay after reading it.

Dierdre is a hypnotic writer, with a beautiful style and phraseology, infusing the logic of the fairytale into modern life with startling results.

If I were a woman, I may have had to put the book down and walk away. This is female folk horror, almost body-horror, tinged with strange tender sadness.

I read Sullivan’s YA novel Perfectly Preventable Deaths last year and liked it, but this is in an entirely different league.

In Hen, a woman worries continually about her appearance as her wedding day approaches and she keeps finding strands of red hair around the house.

In Skein a teenage girl shaves her body compulsively.

In All That You Possess a young girl terrifies her mother with visions of her imaginary friend.

I am not okay.

[Jenny · Rating 5 out of 5]

These haunting short stories explore the bodily experiences and psyches of their female protagonists. From stories that highlight in the abject in ways that make readers shudder, to uncanny and creepy haunted dolls, this collection contains a varied and nuanced response to horror (particularly body horror) and to navigating the world as a woman.

I would recommend this book for fans of Carmen Maria Machado, and for those looking for striking explorations of motherhood, mother/daughter relationships, societal expectations of women, changing bodies and much more.

[Evelyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

[3.5] An interesting collection that examines the complicated nature of growing up as a girl in Ireland - often with little unsettling supernatural-like elements worked in to illustrate the point further. This collection has stories from each stage of women's lives, from girlhood to adulthood, and looks into how they're socialized, how they're treated by the world around them, and how they come to see themselves because of it. Little things said or not said, mental illness pushed down, parental favouritism, objectification and self-loathing, essentialization of motherhood, etc.

Some stories ended abruptly and I couldn't root out what Deirdre was trying to say, so I didn't know how to feel about them after (except for "that's gross" in the instance of "Pearleen" and "Skein" in particular, though that may more pertain to my own particular icks regarding body horror). Others were just okay, however some stories felt particularly well executed and really communicated a lot about the female experience. I really loved "Missing in the Morning", but other favourites were "A Scream Away from Someone", "Little Lives", "Appointment", and "The Host".

Be prepared for the occasional strangeness, but I think this is worth the read. I feel like there's a lot to dig into here, and there are elements I could already see that related to concepts I am familiar with from feminist studies courses, and (of course) especially hones in on the discussion of gender, women, and sexuality in Ireland.

[Zara · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really haven’t been reading enough short story collections recently, especially when I consider that they’re often among my favourite kinds of literature.
This one is an absolutely knockout.
This collection gave me an eerie, indescribably unsettling cotton-wool-in-the-mouth type feel. Things are sickly, they’re in the wrong place. A misplaced sweetness, cut with acid. Things are unpleasant in a hard to pin down way. Ambiguously terrifying. In other words- it’s eerie and marvellous.
I especially loved All That You Possess, The Host & Little Lives.
This collection looks at the bildungsroman through a lens of adolescent and adult horror. It has a strong connection to parenthood and ageing, as well as articulating the particular suffocation of social anxiety, the fear of the peripheral. There’s a brilliant twist of supernatural, folkloric & body focus in this, enough for it really hit all of my favourite themes. Some images were slightly repetitive, which lead to the 4 star in place of a 5. Otherwise, this is super strong & mesmerising.

[Róisín · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this collection from the first paragraph. Deirdre Sullivan has a beautiful way with words. In this collection of short stories she merges relatable experiences with the strange and the haunting to draw these stories into the realm of the darkly fantastical. Her women struggle with meeting the expectations society burdens them with; her girls struggle with the complexities of adolescence; through it all runs a thread of the visceral, powerful and sometimes traumatic experience of existing within our bodies, both mentally and physically, and the self-reflective nature of existence. This is Sullivan’s first book aimed at adults - she usually writes for YA/children - and maybe that accounts to some extent for her unfettered investigation into everyday existence, where the real merges with the supernatural, where darkness is lurking in many corners but comfort can be found in the most unexpected of places. An absolutely captivating and thrilling collection of stories. I’m aiming to read some of her YA books and can’t wait to see what her next offering for adults will be.

[Regina · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really like the author's fantasy works better, the stories all lack something to me and it's telling I enjoyed most the story about haunted dolls sellers, meaning the one that has a little fantasy. The details and tricks those sellers would employ are so thought-out and hilarious.

The second half feels a little more relatable to me, the first is mostly about women around 30 unsettled by expectations of heterosexual womanhood like beauty, marriage, dieting, children. The unrest stays though, as none of the stories have a conclusion, twist or point, we leave the characters in their insecurities which takes some getting used to at first though I appreciated it after a while.

Nearly all protagonists struggle with dieting and eating disorders which one of my rare trigger warnings. It is too present for me, here. Also because the author never shows that eating disorders are about more than staying thin, as I know from experience that disordered eating serves to cope with other problems.

[Emily H · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sullivan's collection of short stories offers an innovative, emotional exploration of various subjects including mental health, parenthood, and trauma. Each story feels fully rounded and interesting, often leaving you to think about the implications and meaning behind certain metaphors.

The imagery is clear and unforgiving at times, yet simple in the sense that they feel very real. This serves as a clear sign of Sullivan's clever construction of the story. I could see the characters in the story and connect with them, and the surrealist elements that were introduced in some pieces.

Overall, Sullivan writes with a very enjoyable, evocative style. The use of second person featured in a few of the stories especially stood out and stuck with me. While I listened to it as an audiobook, I am definitely considering buying it as a paperback to reread.

[Mary · Rating 5 out of 5]

I. LOVED. THIS. BOOK.

To be honest, I love all of Deirdre's work, it's always 'lyrical', it's always a little dark, always a little magic.

I think with this one though, there is so much REAL in with all that lyrical, magical darkness. It's frightening and upsetting and unfinished. They (whoever they are) are still going, alive or dead or in-between.

Deirdre is also a Short Story Master. Or Wizard. Or more likely Witch. Every one of these stories is different to the others, and yet there's that little thread (skein?!) that keeps pulling you through to the next and the next, and then it's all gone and you have to make a cup of tea and go outside to listen to the swallows and the tractors to float back into your own little life.

I'll be thinking about these for a long time.

[Dan Downing · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am fortunate enough to be on the mailing list of Kenny's Bookshop, Galway, Ireland, and when they offered a special numbered, signed edition of Ms. Sullivan's debut adult story collection I was shrewd enough to buy it.
Long ago I read Shirley Jackson's "We Have Always Lived In the Castle". It was her final collection as opposed to this first for Deirdre Sullivan. Probably there is little similarity between the two but Sullivan kept me thinking of Jackson, and occasionally Kafka. Big names to be throwing around, but one never knows. While I will not be digging out my Kafka books or the old paperback of Jackson's, neither is it out of the question that Ms. Sullivan may one day be highly reckoned generally.

Recommended.

[Niamh Ennis · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting and in places very odd collection of stories. All are well written with characters that have some resolution or at least resignation ( something rare enough in short story. collections). There are feminist leanings and exposing sometimes uncomfortably honest body issues, mixed with further not completely real body horror and in general dealing with the extra burdens women carry especially when they dont fit the traditional married with kids narrative , while also giving some less judgemental consideration to mothers dealing with various issues and marital breakdown. Scary, emotive, and very heartbreaking in places, this is a perfect move into a fully rounded adult collection.

[Chelsea Moreen · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a really great anthology about a womans body, mental health and generally not fitting in. I liked most of the short stories, my favourite being Little lives, about a mother daughter duo who sell haunted dolls. Well some of them are haunted anyway.
Even the stories I didn’t like as much I still liked listening too, this was just a really great short story collection I highly recommend it, I especially recommend the audiobook which is read by an Irish voice actor, giving the stories more context and richness to them.

TW: death, grief, sexual assault, mentions of rape, body horror (mild)

[Emily · Rating 2 out of 5]

Like any collection of short stories I think, some of these are really good and thought provoking, and others I found slow or little movement for the duration. I think this may be best as a book, I read it as an audiobook and that means you're less able to just read 1 story, or take long breaks to contemplate meaning in between. It also made the differences between the characters and perspectives less pronounced as it was all read in the same voice.

[Tom Rowley · Rating 5 out of 5]

A really wonderful short story collection that weaves together surreal and supernatural elements. There's a really vivid core feeling of being 'outside' of real, regular life, and how frightening and strange all that real life can be, and how bizarre and miraculous bodies are. Particularly enjoyed Skein

[Reuben Thomas · Rating 2 out of 5]

DNF @ ~50%
I got the sense that Sullivan is a great writer but this particular one just didn’t work all that well for me. There’s a good chance it was the time or format or something else and might have landed differently in different circumstances, so it’s not a hard no, but I’m not invested enough to carry on when there are so many other books out there I want to spend my time on.

[trijnewijn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hoe beoordeel je een boek vol kortverhalen waarvan je bij enkele rillingen krijgt want iew, creepy! of bweh en bij andere zou willen dat het nog heel veel langer zou blijven duren want het is boenk erop en meer van dat alsjeblief.
Ik denk dat Her face voor mij nog het langst zal blijven hangen door de herkenbaarheid ervan.

[Rachy_reads · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5/5

This book of short stories is strange, and odd and so beautiful. It also screams of what it is to be a woman. I wouldn’t be able to describe it if I tried. So I will just urge people to read it so I can try and unpick it and understand it