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In Other Lifetimes All I've Lost Comes Back to Me: Stories
"A deep and howling portrait of longing and loneliness." — The Boston Globe
"A stunner from the very first page." —Deesha Philyaw, author of The Secret Lives of Church Ladies , in the Millions
And praise from Ann Patchett, Alice McDermott, Danielle Evans, Elisa Albert, and Aimee Bender
Populated with lovers who leave and return, with ghosts of the Holocaust and messages from the dead, Courtney Sender's debut collection speaks in a singular new voice about the longings and loneliness of contemporary love. The world of these fourteen interlocking stories is fiercely real but suffused with magic and myth, dark wit, and distinct humor. Here, ancient loss works its way deep into the psyche of modern characters, stirring their unrelenting lust for life.
In "To Do With the Body," the Museum of Period Clothes becomes the perfect setting for a bloody crime. In "Lilith in God's Hands," Adam's first wife has an affair in the Garden of Eden. And in the title story, a woman spends her life waiting for any of the men who have left her to come back, only to find them all at her doorstep at once.
For readers of Elena Ferrante, Nicole Krauss, and Carmen Maria Machado, and for anyone who has known love and loneliness, In Other Lifetimes All I've Lost Comes Back to Me is a wise and sensual collection of old hauntings, new longings, and unexpected returns, with a finale that is a rousing call to the strength we each have, together or alone.
"A stunner from the very first page." —Deesha Philyaw, author of The Secret Lives of Church Ladies , in the Millions
And praise from Ann Patchett, Alice McDermott, Danielle Evans, Elisa Albert, and Aimee Bender
Populated with lovers who leave and return, with ghosts of the Holocaust and messages from the dead, Courtney Sender's debut collection speaks in a singular new voice about the longings and loneliness of contemporary love. The world of these fourteen interlocking stories is fiercely real but suffused with magic and myth, dark wit, and distinct humor. Here, ancient loss works its way deep into the psyche of modern characters, stirring their unrelenting lust for life.
In "To Do With the Body," the Museum of Period Clothes becomes the perfect setting for a bloody crime. In "Lilith in God's Hands," Adam's first wife has an affair in the Garden of Eden. And in the title story, a woman spends her life waiting for any of the men who have left her to come back, only to find them all at her doorstep at once.
For readers of Elena Ferrante, Nicole Krauss, and Carmen Maria Machado, and for anyone who has known love and loneliness, In Other Lifetimes All I've Lost Comes Back to Me is a wise and sensual collection of old hauntings, new longings, and unexpected returns, with a finale that is a rousing call to the strength we each have, together or alone.
215 pages, Paperback
Published March 1, 2023
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291 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 21 of 21 reviews
June 8, 2023
In a Nutshell: Definitely good writing in this anthology, but also, definitely not my kind of writing. Will work better for the right reader.
There's no author's note in this anthology to introduce us to the connecting themes in the fourteen stories or the thought behind the collection. (I love authors’ notes in anthologies; they make a vast difference to our experience of the stories.) But the blurb reveals love, longing, and loneliness to be the focus of the tales. Each story deals with at least one of these three components, so the claim is valid.
That said, the stories don't follow the traditional writing progression every time but are quite random in their approach. Some are slice of life, some are akin to stream of consciousness monologues, and some are abstract musings on an incident. While some stories offer closure and a neat finish, some end too abruptly. A couple of stories go in a flow but the rest meander on their way to the end.
The wordplay in each story makes it amply clear that the author is talented. The little world created either through ponderings or unfolding scenes is in vivid detail, and the characters are always atypical. But the somewhat metaphysical tone underlying most of the stories didn't click for me.
A few of the stories are partially linked to each other. While there is no overt mention of this, the similar title of the linked stories provides a clue.
As always, I rated the stories individually, and the result is somewhat a mixed bag. The stories that catered to my taste in terms of plot development and storytelling scored high, while the ones that were more abstract and rambling didn’t fare that well. These were my top favourites:
Only Things We Say - 🌟🌟🌟🌟💫
The Docent - 🌟🌟🌟🌟💫
Both the above had three things in common – a proper build-up, an impressive first person narrator, and a poignant ending.
All in all, the stories do have merit and they will work better for a reader with more philosophical literary tastes. Not for me though. This was a clever anthology, but I wasn't clever enough for it. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
3.2 stars, based on the average of my ratings for each story.
My thanks to author Courtney Sender and BookSirens for the DRC of “In Other Lifetimes, All I've Lost Comes Back to Me: Stories”. This review is voluntary and contains my honest opinion about the book.
———————————————
Connect with me through:
My Blog | The StoryGraph | Instagram | Facebook | Twitter
There's no author's note in this anthology to introduce us to the connecting themes in the fourteen stories or the thought behind the collection. (I love authors’ notes in anthologies; they make a vast difference to our experience of the stories.) But the blurb reveals love, longing, and loneliness to be the focus of the tales. Each story deals with at least one of these three components, so the claim is valid.
That said, the stories don't follow the traditional writing progression every time but are quite random in their approach. Some are slice of life, some are akin to stream of consciousness monologues, and some are abstract musings on an incident. While some stories offer closure and a neat finish, some end too abruptly. A couple of stories go in a flow but the rest meander on their way to the end.
The wordplay in each story makes it amply clear that the author is talented. The little world created either through ponderings or unfolding scenes is in vivid detail, and the characters are always atypical. But the somewhat metaphysical tone underlying most of the stories didn't click for me.
A few of the stories are partially linked to each other. While there is no overt mention of this, the similar title of the linked stories provides a clue.
As always, I rated the stories individually, and the result is somewhat a mixed bag. The stories that catered to my taste in terms of plot development and storytelling scored high, while the ones that were more abstract and rambling didn’t fare that well. These were my top favourites:
Only Things We Say - 🌟🌟🌟🌟💫
The Docent - 🌟🌟🌟🌟💫
Both the above had three things in common – a proper build-up, an impressive first person narrator, and a poignant ending.
All in all, the stories do have merit and they will work better for a reader with more philosophical literary tastes. Not for me though. This was a clever anthology, but I wasn't clever enough for it. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
3.2 stars, based on the average of my ratings for each story.
My thanks to author Courtney Sender and BookSirens for the DRC of “In Other Lifetimes, All I've Lost Comes Back to Me: Stories”. This review is voluntary and contains my honest opinion about the book.
———————————————
Connect with me through:
My Blog | The StoryGraph | Instagram | Facebook | Twitter
Want to read
May 27, 2023Courtney was the best creative writing prof ever :) this is so cool
April 14, 2024
For fans of: sad yearning girls, magical realism, Biblical imagery
Beautiful & unique
Beautiful & unique
August 8, 2023
This collection of 14 beautiful stories interlocking stories has a little myth, wit, and humor. The stories are about people yearning to find the right partner and live happily ever after. The stories focus on various themes around family, love, identity, and loneliness, and they take place over different times, religions, locations, and relationships. Each story stands on its own, but they all connect meaningfully. Many topics were covered, like concentration camps, soul mates, military families, the holocaust, and more.
The characters and dialogue are vivid and authentic. There are many different points of view, and the stories happen and show the before and after. In the title story, the narrator lists the qualities of past lovers and describes what her life would have been if she had stayed in the relationship. I really liked the "Then the Angel on Stilts" story from the perspective of someone who is left behind and still longs for the other person. I especially loved this line, "I am better in the short form, I have been told since you went away. My stories about loss that start with and end with loss are more tolerable when they finish fast." A paragraph from the story "To Lose Everything I've Ever Love" also says, "I start to think it has all been a problem of genre. During those years I spent loving a man who wasn't mine, I thought I was living a romance or maybe a tragedy. My friend tried to get me to see it as a comedy. In fact, it was a horror story."
To listen to my interview with the author, go to my podcast at:https://www.momsdonthavetimetoreadboo...
The characters and dialogue are vivid and authentic. There are many different points of view, and the stories happen and show the before and after. In the title story, the narrator lists the qualities of past lovers and describes what her life would have been if she had stayed in the relationship. I really liked the "Then the Angel on Stilts" story from the perspective of someone who is left behind and still longs for the other person. I especially loved this line, "I am better in the short form, I have been told since you went away. My stories about loss that start with and end with loss are more tolerable when they finish fast." A paragraph from the story "To Lose Everything I've Ever Love" also says, "I start to think it has all been a problem of genre. During those years I spent loving a man who wasn't mine, I thought I was living a romance or maybe a tragedy. My friend tried to get me to see it as a comedy. In fact, it was a horror story."
To listen to my interview with the author, go to my podcast at:https://www.momsdonthavetimetoreadboo...
July 11, 2025
Short story collections can be tough for me. :/ I tend to only connect to a specific style, and said style wasn’t in this collection very much.
The throughline here is relationships, usually explored at close, dizzying range. Like there’s not a world that exists beyond these people, except in some cases (see below!)
There is a fair amount of Jewish content, I’ll give you that. :P The lovers in “Black Harness” go on a tour of a concentration camp. “The Docent” is about a concentration camp prisoner (and the relationship, more disturbingly, is between this person and a guard.) A Holocaust ghostly grandmother haunts “To Lose Everything I Ever Loved.” Then Lilith and Eve, or their stand-ins, take part in “To Do With the Body” and “Lilith in the Hands of God.”
“Narrators often search for lovers and regret not staying with different lovers from the past,” Jamie Welt writes in her Jewish Book Council review. “In the title story, the narrator lists qualities of past lovers and describes what her life would have been like had she stayed in a relationship with specific individuals.” I think I have trouble connecting to something so myopic.
My favorite story in the collection brings a more tangible tension, imho. In “Only Things We Say,” the protagonist’s children join the Marines: a possibly dangerous line of work. Also distancing—physically and emotionally.
Judaism is also a point of contention, in a way members of interfaith families like mine can understand. “Cat might have been Jewish in another life,” the narrator says of his daughter. “Maybe that was my mistake. Maybe I’d given up too easily. Maybe if I’d fought, decades ago when Mel and I got married in her parents’ church, I could have stopped all this. Mel had bent over backwards for the husband before me, then stood up again, convinced it was a man’s turn now to bend to her. So I’d bent. Looking back, of course, I could have argued. I could have raised my sons under a God who’d had none. I could have kept them.”
Arguably myopic, too? Maybe. But at least the ruminations are about how relationships actually bent down the path of life, vs the idealized ones that flickered out ages ago.
In all honesty, maybe I’m uncomfortable because the feelings expressed here are so relatable. Emma Copley Eisenberg writes in Electric Literature that the collection “explores feminist millennial rage and the ways the trauma of the Holocaust has been passed-down through Jewish American families.” This declaration doesn’t mean as much to me as Sender’s response: “In the throes of a certain extreme longing for a life that you simply cannot have, because the path to it has already been foreclosed, you’re seeking anything for comfort and solace. But you’re also seeking anything to blame.”
I definitely allow myself to get sucked into a similar whirlpool of existential angst. But reading most of these stories reminds me how exhausting those feelings are to people on the outside. This must be why my mother’s response to my circular breakdowns is “stop it, or I’ll bury you alive in a box!”
Maybe I’m not literary enough for this collection, which honestly explores some Jewish female themes of my generation. But life, God willing, has many more books to try. Moving on.
The throughline here is relationships, usually explored at close, dizzying range. Like there’s not a world that exists beyond these people, except in some cases (see below!)
There is a fair amount of Jewish content, I’ll give you that. :P The lovers in “Black Harness” go on a tour of a concentration camp. “The Docent” is about a concentration camp prisoner (and the relationship, more disturbingly, is between this person and a guard.) A Holocaust ghostly grandmother haunts “To Lose Everything I Ever Loved.” Then Lilith and Eve, or their stand-ins, take part in “To Do With the Body” and “Lilith in the Hands of God.”
“Narrators often search for lovers and regret not staying with different lovers from the past,” Jamie Welt writes in her Jewish Book Council review. “In the title story, the narrator lists qualities of past lovers and describes what her life would have been like had she stayed in a relationship with specific individuals.” I think I have trouble connecting to something so myopic.
My favorite story in the collection brings a more tangible tension, imho. In “Only Things We Say,” the protagonist’s children join the Marines: a possibly dangerous line of work. Also distancing—physically and emotionally.
Judaism is also a point of contention, in a way members of interfaith families like mine can understand. “Cat might have been Jewish in another life,” the narrator says of his daughter. “Maybe that was my mistake. Maybe I’d given up too easily. Maybe if I’d fought, decades ago when Mel and I got married in her parents’ church, I could have stopped all this. Mel had bent over backwards for the husband before me, then stood up again, convinced it was a man’s turn now to bend to her. So I’d bent. Looking back, of course, I could have argued. I could have raised my sons under a God who’d had none. I could have kept them.”
Arguably myopic, too? Maybe. But at least the ruminations are about how relationships actually bent down the path of life, vs the idealized ones that flickered out ages ago.
In all honesty, maybe I’m uncomfortable because the feelings expressed here are so relatable. Emma Copley Eisenberg writes in Electric Literature that the collection “explores feminist millennial rage and the ways the trauma of the Holocaust has been passed-down through Jewish American families.” This declaration doesn’t mean as much to me as Sender’s response: “In the throes of a certain extreme longing for a life that you simply cannot have, because the path to it has already been foreclosed, you’re seeking anything for comfort and solace. But you’re also seeking anything to blame.”
I definitely allow myself to get sucked into a similar whirlpool of existential angst. But reading most of these stories reminds me how exhausting those feelings are to people on the outside. This must be why my mother’s response to my circular breakdowns is “stop it, or I’ll bury you alive in a box!”
Maybe I’m not literary enough for this collection, which honestly explores some Jewish female themes of my generation. But life, God willing, has many more books to try. Moving on.
June 21, 2023
"In Other Lifetimes All I've Lost Comes Back To Me" is short story collection about loss: lost chances, lost loves, lost connections, lost families... Many of the tales told are done so in two parts; the before and after, from another's person view, and so on. I found that very interesting, but confusing since, unexpectedly, some stories seemed to be entangled in ways that I still do not understand.
The story that I loved best was that of the father of military children, it devoured me and kept me entranced. There were others that I enjoyed like that of the concentration camp and the soul mates. Others I just could not get into because it felt like an attempt of the author to show a part of her life whilst calling it fiction, these tales I found opaque and dishonest; a fake show of vulnerability from the author, or maybe a fear fuelled try of honesty, that made the story feel empty, with ghosts and secrets. Sometimes I could not understand what was going on with the story, this was not an overall problem but one that I had with the story of the angel on stilts and with the last one.
I did not particularly enjoy the characters, with some there was no opportunity to connect due to lack of development, and with others, especially women, felt as if they were more idealisation and pain than people; all exotic, erotic, and unstable. Something that I would have adored when I was fifteen and wanted to live as an aesthetic.
The writing style was beautiful and I found a ton of quotes that I adore.
NOTE: I received and advance review copy for free, and I am leaving this review voluntarily.
The story that I loved best was that of the father of military children, it devoured me and kept me entranced. There were others that I enjoyed like that of the concentration camp and the soul mates. Others I just could not get into because it felt like an attempt of the author to show a part of her life whilst calling it fiction, these tales I found opaque and dishonest; a fake show of vulnerability from the author, or maybe a fear fuelled try of honesty, that made the story feel empty, with ghosts and secrets. Sometimes I could not understand what was going on with the story, this was not an overall problem but one that I had with the story of the angel on stilts and with the last one.
I did not particularly enjoy the characters, with some there was no opportunity to connect due to lack of development, and with others, especially women, felt as if they were more idealisation and pain than people; all exotic, erotic, and unstable. Something that I would have adored when I was fifteen and wanted to live as an aesthetic.
The writing style was beautiful and I found a ton of quotes that I adore.
NOTE: I received and advance review copy for free, and I am leaving this review voluntarily.
April 17, 2023
I was six years old when WWII ended in Europe, an American Jewish child with memories of ration books, blackouts, and soldiers going to and coming home from war. I lost no immediate family in the Holocaust, and because no one in my family talked about the murder of three million Jews, I never thought the Holocaust belonged to me. It did. And it belongs to the generations that follow mine. Eyewitnesses are vanishing. According to the ADL antisemitic incidents increased 36% over those tabulated in 2021. In my small city in New Hampshire, a purported white supremacist spray painted swastikas on my synagogue, on black owned businesses, on business that displayed the rainbow flag. Holocaust deniers permeate the web. I am grateful that second and third generation family or survivors and of the dead are finding new ways to tell these stories combat this vanishing.
One such writer is Courtney Sender whose debut story collection, In Other Life Times All I’ve Lost Comes Back to Me. In these stories, the past reverberates; ghosts speak; the dead speak. These stories are about contemporary dilemmas of love and longing; they are about the relentlessness of the past which insists on surfacing. They are strange and beautiful. The writing is precise and haunting.
As Alice McDermott writes: “Wholly original, lyrical, fierce, these stories confound expectations at every turn.”
One such writer is Courtney Sender whose debut story collection, In Other Life Times All I’ve Lost Comes Back to Me. In these stories, the past reverberates; ghosts speak; the dead speak. These stories are about contemporary dilemmas of love and longing; they are about the relentlessness of the past which insists on surfacing. They are strange and beautiful. The writing is precise and haunting.
As Alice McDermott writes: “Wholly original, lyrical, fierce, these stories confound expectations at every turn.”
July 11, 2023
In Other Lifetimes All I’ve Lost Comes Back to Me was self-described as comparable to the works of Elena Ferrante, Nicole Krauss, and Carmen Maria Machado, but the exposé nature of some of the stories in this debut collection seems much more reminiscent of Annie Ernaux than any of the other authors mentioned.
An evocative inquiry into femininity that resembles the almost diary-style writings of Ernaux and draws into question how a subject relates to her memories once the present has become the past.
Cyclicality seemed to leak, not simply into the reiterative structuring of the stories but also into the writing itself. While the sense that the narrators (and therefore, we) were spinning out of control did embody the emotional distortion present in the story, in some moments, it became so disorienting that the structure almost seemed to take precedence over the storyline.
A definite read for the overthinking lovers among us. Solid 8/10.
An evocative inquiry into femininity that resembles the almost diary-style writings of Ernaux and draws into question how a subject relates to her memories once the present has become the past.
Cyclicality seemed to leak, not simply into the reiterative structuring of the stories but also into the writing itself. While the sense that the narrators (and therefore, we) were spinning out of control did embody the emotional distortion present in the story, in some moments, it became so disorienting that the structure almost seemed to take precedence over the storyline.
A definite read for the overthinking lovers among us. Solid 8/10.
February 19, 2023
Phenomenal. There's so much in these pages--love and yearning and heartbreak and haunting and even hope. Sender takes us through these emotions in stories that are in intimate conversation with each other. Their content spans from the Holocaust to the Garden of Eden to the world we live in now, some with a touch of the speculative, some not, yet all are wholly accessible. This is a book for anyone who has known loss or regret, who sees their identity as linked to that of their family, who has ever wondered about the inevitability of their loneliness. There is such power and ingenuity in the writing here. I will be thinking about these stories for quite some time.
July 24, 2023
This was a beautiful book. Courtney Sender has a light touch that manages to reach and convey great depths. The book is easy and quick to read yet packs a serious emotional touch. Interwoven short stories, each stands on its own, but overall they're connected and really convey the impact of a novel. Themes of yearning and loss, identity, family relations, I generally don't like short stories (unsatisfying) but these were very satisfying -- I look forward to her future work.
August 3, 2023
I couldn’t put this down which was unusual for me because stories usually take me longer to get through. But this collection is so mesmerizing and unique. My favorites were “To Do With the Body” (with its connections to Lilith’s story - Lily & Eva) and “For Someone so Scared.” It felt personal and authentic, raw and real, but also so magical and enchanting. Love love love
January 22, 2025
The stories in this book not only stand alone as beautiful independent pieces, but work together to create a cohesive narrative of recurring themes, often referenced in surprising ways, tenderly reminding the reader of earlier moments in the book both overtly and subtly. I absolutely loved this book and really recommend it! Courtney is a wonderful writer.
April 14, 2023
What a lovely collection. The stories were beautifully imagined and often surprising, and there was an aching sense of loss and desire throughout. At a sentence level, the prose was vivid without drawing undue attention to itself.
June 12, 2023
3.5 stars rounded up. This collection of stories is filled with yearning, emotional deep dives, and magic gone sideways. Likely too contemporary for my understanding, there was something almost primal and relatable in the messages.
Thanks to the publisher and Book Sirens for the ARC.
Thanks to the publisher and Book Sirens for the ARC.
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March 17, 2023An impressive debut collection about love, loss, and legacies that linger, with a mix of styles (realist, speculative, midrashic). Grateful for my complimentary advance review copy.
March 31, 2023
Sender is a master of the short story. This is a stellar debut. The stories are rich, subtle, moving. Get your hands on this ASAP.
May 18, 2023
Fresh, imaginative and so well written. This is a great collection.
October 28, 2023
Brilliant.
July 31, 2025
short stories aren’t my usual fare so this was a bit out of my reading comfort zone. this collection was a mixed bag for me, but the prose was lovely throughout.
March 24, 2023
With a voice simultaneously young and old, steeped in questions of faith and an encyclopedic knowledge of history, Courtney Sender hooks us with her singular magic. My interview with Sender https://lilith.org/2023/03/alove-lett...
March 28, 2025
Alcuni racconti folgoranti.
Altri trascinati.
Nel complesso una bella scoperta.
Altri trascinati.
Nel complesso una bella scoperta.
Displaying 1 - 21 of 21 reviews