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Squandering the Blue: Stories
Single mothers, insolent daughters, blood sisters, and desperate friends people the tales in this twelve-story cycle, as they live out urban fairy tales and nightmares in the atmospheric landscape of Los Angeles
- GenresShort StoriesFiction
241 pages, Hardcover
First published September 26, 1990
3 people are currently reading
261 people want to read
About the author
Kate Braverman
33 books84 followersKate Braverman (born 1950) was an American novelist, short story writer, and poet, originally from Los Angeles, California, who has garnered great acclaim for works including the novels Lithium for Medea (1979), Palm Latitudes (1988), Wonders of the West (1993), and The Incantation of Frida K (2001). Her most significant work has been in stylistic hybrid forms built upon poems and rendered as short stories. She has published two books of short stories, "Squandering the Blue" (1990) and "Small Craft Warnings" (1997). She has also published four books of poetry. She has won three Best American Short Stories awards, an O. Henry Award, Carver Short Story Award, as well as the Economist Prize and an Isherwood Fellowship. She was also the first recipient of Graywolf Press Creative Nonfiction Award for Frantic Transmissions to and from Los Angeles: An Accidental Memoir, published February 2006.
Braverman has a BA in Anthropology from UC Berkeley and an MA in English from Sonoma State University. She was a founding member of the Venice Poetry Workshop, Professor of Creative Writing at CSULA, staff faculty of the UCLA Writer's Program and taught privately a workshop which included Janet Fitch, Cristina Garcia and Donald Rawley. She lived in San Francisco.
Braverman has a BA in Anthropology from UC Berkeley and an MA in English from Sonoma State University. She was a founding member of the Venice Poetry Workshop, Professor of Creative Writing at CSULA, staff faculty of the UCLA Writer's Program and taught privately a workshop which included Janet Fitch, Cristina Garcia and Donald Rawley. She lived in San Francisco.
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Displaying 1 - 27 of 27 reviews
August 1, 2017
Twelve short stories, crafted with acute attention to constructing the perfect sentence, the willful sentiment. "Tall Tales from the Mekong Delta" was by far my favorite, a combination of O'Connor's devil in "A Good Man is Hard to Find" and a West Coast Tama Janowitz heroine.
Blue is a common motif threaded through each story, and while Braverman is a fantastic author I think I should have perhaps spaced out the reading of the stories over more days - the booze/drug fueled women-on-the-verge, dealing with daughters that hate and men that abandon are present in every story, making the collection bleed into one. A friend gave a high recommendation for Lithium for Medea, that will be my next Braverman.
Blue is a common motif threaded through each story, and while Braverman is a fantastic author I think I should have perhaps spaced out the reading of the stories over more days - the booze/drug fueled women-on-the-verge, dealing with daughters that hate and men that abandon are present in every story, making the collection bleed into one. A friend gave a high recommendation for Lithium for Medea, that will be my next Braverman.
June 19, 2013
In another context, the lives of the women in these stories might be called grim. But in a book so saturated with color, I can only call them flamboyantly messed up.
This is what you get. Short declarative,descriptive sentences. Dense, poetic language. Vivid, colorful imagery. Symbolism, ruminations, introspection, meditations. This will not be everyone’s cup of tea, but I was intrigued by the use of language and mood created by it.
These dozen stories are set mostly in Los Angeles, Hawaii or jungle regions removed from civilization. The protagonists all have in common certain elements in their past or present: drug or alcohol addiction; rehab; awful, awful, outlaw men (or lawyers); loved ones with cancer; fear of poverty; and navigating the impossibly complex land-mined distances between mothers or daughters. They are all travelers, following men or compulsions, and struggling with a sense of resignation about having to adapt to where they are or will wind up. All of these women are damaged creatures not quite sure of the limits of their hopes or resolve. They often descend to new depths of degradation without understanding why, or realize their own dynamics only in retrospect. There is a mood of quiet desperation that is not quite despair. These women keep trying, at least, to understand their lives. Although I cannot say the trying is always an uplifting spectacle to watch, the reading experience is worth having.
In “Squandering the Blue” a woman remembers her childhood with an odd-ball alcoholic poet of a mother whom she, as a girl, treats with contempt and disdain, but bringing an adult’s perspective and understanding and regrets to the tale.
In “Winter Blues” a single mother who is writing a dissertation on suicidal poets (Plath, Sexton, Hart Crane) and trying to keep her young daughter entertained by wandering shopping malls remembers life with her former lover and the many places they wandered:
Erica considers Derek and the hotel rooms that lie between them. Always a shuttered window is opening onto an alley or a plaza with a monument, a bronze soldier school children leave tulips for. There are mountains beyond the city. It is India or France or Peru. Derek has removed the cameras from his neck, the many eyes he thinks justify him. He has fallen across the sofa as if harpooned. He will remain that way indefinitely. In between she will make herself smell expensive. She will put on lipstick, kohl, and high heels. She will put on pearls and a silk scarf at her neck. She will visit doctors and collect codeine prescriptions for him.
Derek will not tour the museum or take her to dinner. Beyond the hotel window, up a hill, are the ruins of a city Homer mentioned. Derek is watching “Hawaii Five-O” on television. It is dubbed in a language he does not speak. He studies the edges of frames, searching for something familiar. He is transfixed, as if he expected to encounter old friends.
And she thinks of Maui, with the ocean blue beyond blue, livid, newly formed. It was on the other side of the lanai. It needed neither purpose nor justification. It was a blue beyond the postcards. The sea and jungle resisted reproduction. The actual colors were an extravagance beyond the camera. Hawaii could not make itself small and conventional enough for the lens. Nothing could accommodate the glare of the plumeria. Or the green in all its permutations, uninhibited, rebellious, startling.
In “Tall Tales from the Mekong Delta” the heroine meets an extraordinary creepy character on her way to an AA meeting. The way in which the protagonist reacts to this encounter and the ensuing relationship, commensurate with her own dysfunction, makes this the most powerful and disturbing of the dozen stories.
In “A Touch of Autumn,” creative writing teacher Lauren crosses the Murphy Sculpture Garden at UCLA on her way to an evening class, coveting a drink after three years of sobriety, bargaining, rationalizing her desire, remembering a former life as a younger, out-of-control alcoholic and drug addict (Derek makes a reappearance in these memories) and considering the meaning of her life as she nears forty.
She is standing in front of an angular configuration that might be a dog from another and more affectionate world. Above the sky is pinching out another meek night blue horizon. The sculptures seem to have shells. . . It occurs to her that the lawn is littered with autopsies under a half moon. Perhaps these figures of tortured metal tell us we are no longer of this world. We are ruins. We have the serenity of the utterly defeated, that which surrenders to the stasis of perpetual geometry. This is all there is, this cemetery of distortion and its hideous implications.
In “Temporary Light,” a divorced mother in extremely reduced socioeconomic circumstances tries to plan a nice Christmas visit with her two children and to relate to her own abusive mother, with varying degrees of success.
In “Over the Hill” privileged Beverly Hills wife Jessica contemplates her rarified environment, where her powerful attorney husband Frank controls her by constantly terrifying her with the prospect of poverty. Jessica is pathetic, but Frank is disgusting.
In “Points of Decision,” Jessica and Frank take a birthday trip to Hawaii. Jessica shares a certain compulsion with the protagonist of the first story, “Squandering the Blue.”
Jessica recognizes this fantasy. For years she has been haunted by the feeling that she must jump ship wherever she is and somehow adapt to the local environment, however alien or hostile. Whenever she changed planes, in Oakland or London, stopped for gas in Spokane or Houston, she was tormented by the sense that she must find a place to live there, a job, a situation. She is aware of the fact that her thoughts are virulent and inappropriate. Still, she finds it hard to stop.
In spite of her desire to escape, she realizes that people’s fantasies are often unrealistic: . . . she knows the secret lives of women who cannot tolerate water stains on their glasses envisioning themselves in Borneo or Java, ridding swamps of malaria, planting the crop. This is what we do, silently, subconsciously, we are lurching enchanted between the implausible. Men wait for their pina coladas, vowing to become charter-fishing-boat captains if the investigation reaches the proportion of a scandal. Men who cannot read the stars or a city map are planning to navigate a borderless green in hurricane season.
The last story, “These Clairvoyant Ruins,” revisits Diana and her eight-year-old daughter Annabell, from a couple of the earlier stories. They are preparing for and attending Annabell’s Christmas pageant, Fiestas de las Luces, where she will play the violin (badly). Diana and Annabell have common mother/daughter tensions between them, but they seem to be trying to mitigate the cruelties to which they subject each other. Diana’s revelations as she contemplates the meaning of ritual and relationships in this season sound a note of hope:
This is why we consecrate the days, Diana Barrington is thinking. Our birthdays and festivals, our rites and gods, these are the notes in the void. This is sacred, the invisible bones of hours and situations, infected with emotion.
We see the curtain close and we stand. We applaud. Our children wear ceremonial garments, velvet and wings. We stand motionless before them. We present them with bouquets.
Several stories end with, if not exactly hope, then something close, the feeling that an alternative may be possible for these women. They may have only glimpses of their own dynamics and the slight possibility of other paradigms, but it is enough to keep them going.
This is what you get. Short declarative,descriptive sentences. Dense, poetic language. Vivid, colorful imagery. Symbolism, ruminations, introspection, meditations. This will not be everyone’s cup of tea, but I was intrigued by the use of language and mood created by it.
These dozen stories are set mostly in Los Angeles, Hawaii or jungle regions removed from civilization. The protagonists all have in common certain elements in their past or present: drug or alcohol addiction; rehab; awful, awful, outlaw men (or lawyers); loved ones with cancer; fear of poverty; and navigating the impossibly complex land-mined distances between mothers or daughters. They are all travelers, following men or compulsions, and struggling with a sense of resignation about having to adapt to where they are or will wind up. All of these women are damaged creatures not quite sure of the limits of their hopes or resolve. They often descend to new depths of degradation without understanding why, or realize their own dynamics only in retrospect. There is a mood of quiet desperation that is not quite despair. These women keep trying, at least, to understand their lives. Although I cannot say the trying is always an uplifting spectacle to watch, the reading experience is worth having.
In “Squandering the Blue” a woman remembers her childhood with an odd-ball alcoholic poet of a mother whom she, as a girl, treats with contempt and disdain, but bringing an adult’s perspective and understanding and regrets to the tale.
In “Winter Blues” a single mother who is writing a dissertation on suicidal poets (Plath, Sexton, Hart Crane) and trying to keep her young daughter entertained by wandering shopping malls remembers life with her former lover and the many places they wandered:
Erica considers Derek and the hotel rooms that lie between them. Always a shuttered window is opening onto an alley or a plaza with a monument, a bronze soldier school children leave tulips for. There are mountains beyond the city. It is India or France or Peru. Derek has removed the cameras from his neck, the many eyes he thinks justify him. He has fallen across the sofa as if harpooned. He will remain that way indefinitely. In between she will make herself smell expensive. She will put on lipstick, kohl, and high heels. She will put on pearls and a silk scarf at her neck. She will visit doctors and collect codeine prescriptions for him.
Derek will not tour the museum or take her to dinner. Beyond the hotel window, up a hill, are the ruins of a city Homer mentioned. Derek is watching “Hawaii Five-O” on television. It is dubbed in a language he does not speak. He studies the edges of frames, searching for something familiar. He is transfixed, as if he expected to encounter old friends.
And she thinks of Maui, with the ocean blue beyond blue, livid, newly formed. It was on the other side of the lanai. It needed neither purpose nor justification. It was a blue beyond the postcards. The sea and jungle resisted reproduction. The actual colors were an extravagance beyond the camera. Hawaii could not make itself small and conventional enough for the lens. Nothing could accommodate the glare of the plumeria. Or the green in all its permutations, uninhibited, rebellious, startling.
In “Tall Tales from the Mekong Delta” the heroine meets an extraordinary creepy character on her way to an AA meeting. The way in which the protagonist reacts to this encounter and the ensuing relationship, commensurate with her own dysfunction, makes this the most powerful and disturbing of the dozen stories.
In “A Touch of Autumn,” creative writing teacher Lauren crosses the Murphy Sculpture Garden at UCLA on her way to an evening class, coveting a drink after three years of sobriety, bargaining, rationalizing her desire, remembering a former life as a younger, out-of-control alcoholic and drug addict (Derek makes a reappearance in these memories) and considering the meaning of her life as she nears forty.
She is standing in front of an angular configuration that might be a dog from another and more affectionate world. Above the sky is pinching out another meek night blue horizon. The sculptures seem to have shells. . . It occurs to her that the lawn is littered with autopsies under a half moon. Perhaps these figures of tortured metal tell us we are no longer of this world. We are ruins. We have the serenity of the utterly defeated, that which surrenders to the stasis of perpetual geometry. This is all there is, this cemetery of distortion and its hideous implications.
In “Temporary Light,” a divorced mother in extremely reduced socioeconomic circumstances tries to plan a nice Christmas visit with her two children and to relate to her own abusive mother, with varying degrees of success.
In “Over the Hill” privileged Beverly Hills wife Jessica contemplates her rarified environment, where her powerful attorney husband Frank controls her by constantly terrifying her with the prospect of poverty. Jessica is pathetic, but Frank is disgusting.
In “Points of Decision,” Jessica and Frank take a birthday trip to Hawaii. Jessica shares a certain compulsion with the protagonist of the first story, “Squandering the Blue.”
Jessica recognizes this fantasy. For years she has been haunted by the feeling that she must jump ship wherever she is and somehow adapt to the local environment, however alien or hostile. Whenever she changed planes, in Oakland or London, stopped for gas in Spokane or Houston, she was tormented by the sense that she must find a place to live there, a job, a situation. She is aware of the fact that her thoughts are virulent and inappropriate. Still, she finds it hard to stop.
In spite of her desire to escape, she realizes that people’s fantasies are often unrealistic: . . . she knows the secret lives of women who cannot tolerate water stains on their glasses envisioning themselves in Borneo or Java, ridding swamps of malaria, planting the crop. This is what we do, silently, subconsciously, we are lurching enchanted between the implausible. Men wait for their pina coladas, vowing to become charter-fishing-boat captains if the investigation reaches the proportion of a scandal. Men who cannot read the stars or a city map are planning to navigate a borderless green in hurricane season.
The last story, “These Clairvoyant Ruins,” revisits Diana and her eight-year-old daughter Annabell, from a couple of the earlier stories. They are preparing for and attending Annabell’s Christmas pageant, Fiestas de las Luces, where she will play the violin (badly). Diana and Annabell have common mother/daughter tensions between them, but they seem to be trying to mitigate the cruelties to which they subject each other. Diana’s revelations as she contemplates the meaning of ritual and relationships in this season sound a note of hope:
This is why we consecrate the days, Diana Barrington is thinking. Our birthdays and festivals, our rites and gods, these are the notes in the void. This is sacred, the invisible bones of hours and situations, infected with emotion.
We see the curtain close and we stand. We applaud. Our children wear ceremonial garments, velvet and wings. We stand motionless before them. We present them with bouquets.
Several stories end with, if not exactly hope, then something close, the feeling that an alternative may be possible for these women. They may have only glimpses of their own dynamics and the slight possibility of other paradigms, but it is enough to keep them going.
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June 10, 2024I only wish her work had the recognition it deserves
February 13, 2008
I've read all of her work. She gave me great inspiration as a young writer. She's a great lady; I've seen her read several times. I thought it tremendously brave to take the first person of Kahlo and mock-up an autobiography. Now living here in LA myself, so much more of her undeniably beautiful combonations of words breathe vibrantly in my everyday.
September 17, 2024
This is Braverman’s best work.
August 25, 2023
“We are bisected, she thinks, we are elongated, we are magnified. We sit in fountains spurting water from too many orifices. We put the typewriter on the floor under the dining room table and live there. We are safe with the wood over our heads. We sit there for eleven days and nights, consecutively, making holes in the veins of our arms and legs. We write poems in blood. We think we are justified. Our arms are infected. We suspect we are not as God intended. We have a profusion of cavities. Our gender is monumental. Isn’t that what our sculpture tells us? We are appetite without skulls. We are amputated. We have children without husbands. We have our babies completely alone like a renegade species. We have no tribes or totems. We have no rituals of solace. When we are born or when we die no one lights candles. No one can remember the litanies, the words to summon and amuse the gods. We live alone. We are celibate for decades. We have been dropped to earth and deserted. Perhaps we are music. Someone listened to us fall. Perhaps we are a degraded form of rain.”
September 7, 2014
Braverman truly deserves to be better known; her unsentimental, uncompromising world view recalls the best of Oates and Didion. "Squandering the Blue", a series of 12 interlocking stories set for the most part in Los Angeles especially bring Didion to mind.
In Braverman's L.A., "The air is ancient, sharp, and malicious. It was here first." The female protagonists, most of them writers, in these stories share similar traits: substance abuse, struggles with sobriety, single parenthood, and bad choices in men. Not surprising, Braverman herself fits many of these descriptions. Such lives distort situations in which many find joy. Christmas takes a beating, as a season of 'slaughtered pines'. There are no happy endings promised, for "we all have a touch of autumn, perhaps, like an X-ray with a touch of shadow on the lung." Still, there are moments of grace to be found in Braverman's benighted L.A., and her tough, poetic prose makes the grim journeys worthwhile.
In Braverman's L.A., "The air is ancient, sharp, and malicious. It was here first." The female protagonists, most of them writers, in these stories share similar traits: substance abuse, struggles with sobriety, single parenthood, and bad choices in men. Not surprising, Braverman herself fits many of these descriptions. Such lives distort situations in which many find joy. Christmas takes a beating, as a season of 'slaughtered pines'. There are no happy endings promised, for "we all have a touch of autumn, perhaps, like an X-ray with a touch of shadow on the lung." Still, there are moments of grace to be found in Braverman's benighted L.A., and her tough, poetic prose makes the grim journeys worthwhile.
August 6, 2013
Kate Braverman is a terrific writer - a master at atmosphere. Her female protagonists battle interior ruination (addiction, distraction, depression, turning 40, men) in a landscape that seems all too familiar to me, as a Californian. Seriously, if you went to UCLA, you have to read "A Touch of Autumn." You'll never walk through the sculpture garden the same way again. Actually, if you live in Los Angeles you might totally nod your head in agreement at her imagery: "autistic freeways" and "stray rubber trees near the laundry rooms."
The best story of the collection is one I've read before, "Tall Tales from the Mekong Delta." Worth the price of the book (although my copy was kindly loaned to me).
The best story of the collection is one I've read before, "Tall Tales from the Mekong Delta." Worth the price of the book (although my copy was kindly loaned to me).
May 2, 2007
Really beautiful stories about addiction and recovery. There are some times when this book is the only thing I can deal with.
October 1, 2022
Based on reading this and upon a Bookworm interview she gave for it, I believe that all the characters in these stories are actually Kate, including Diane Barrington and her friend Carlotta. Schizophrenia is mentioned in many of Braverman's work mostly in reference to her mother. But there is a splitting that occurred within Kate when it came to her attempts at sobriety. She is haunted by her childhood and by old lovers who fueled her addictions. These subjects recur over and over again and yet Kate, ever the poet, makes it all fresh with her incredible mastery of language. A troubled, brilliant, intense woman who left us far too soon.
December 1, 2020
These stories are so intense. Kate Braverman was a phenomenal writer and deserved everything from the literary and mundane worlds that she believed she did. She writes in short sentences. She takes the narrative of short sentences to extremes within her characters and in their cosmologies and into critiques on L.A. society. This collection is amazing. Braverman isn’t just good for a girl-writer. She’s one of the best writers ever. I’m sorry she’s dead, I hope she’s looking down on me, and I hope she returns soon!
January 16, 2020
I fell for Braverman's writing quite deeply in the first pages, and was then pushed out with every subsequent turn of the page. Her use of words and imagery do not make up for many manifestations of privileged disaffection and ennui that mirror each other. Over and over she writes about things coalescing, but it feels more like emptiness merging with emptiness with nothing to say and nothing to anchor.
January 5, 2008
“Tall Tales from the Mekong Delta” blew me away. I re-read it a couple of times a year just to get that creeped-out feeling all over again.
June 3, 2019
Women turning 40 who are each an addict, poet, mother, lover of Kauai, resident of Los Angeles describe their state of being in saturated poetic prose.
March 20, 2011
I stopped even pretending to write after I read this book. It's that good.
March 20, 2022
The women in these stories have been through hell. Abuse, neglect, addiction, severe mental illness, midlife crisis, parental anxiety and cancer creep behind the corners in these powerful, intense stories.
Braverman's unique style eschews realism and there's little plot. The stories unfold largely as stunning, poetic, dark, abstract, existential daydreams inside the minds of the characters, who are usually educated and artistically-minded. These women exist on the precipice of addiction or mental illness or both. The stories usually occur during epiphanies or turning points in their lives. They express their internal reality not through blunt or mundane musings, but instead in splendid evocations of colors, sunsets, plants, landscapes and cityscapes, investing them with meanings, connecting them to human emotions and the unknowable.
The characters, settings and situations are similar from story to story. But the mode and Braverman's voice are so stunning and original that it hardly seems to matter. The experience of reading them is overwhelming but very compelling.
Braverman's unique style eschews realism and there's little plot. The stories unfold largely as stunning, poetic, dark, abstract, existential daydreams inside the minds of the characters, who are usually educated and artistically-minded. These women exist on the precipice of addiction or mental illness or both. The stories usually occur during epiphanies or turning points in their lives. They express their internal reality not through blunt or mundane musings, but instead in splendid evocations of colors, sunsets, plants, landscapes and cityscapes, investing them with meanings, connecting them to human emotions and the unknowable.
The characters, settings and situations are similar from story to story. But the mode and Braverman's voice are so stunning and original that it hardly seems to matter. The experience of reading them is overwhelming but very compelling.
July 11, 2018
Kate Braverman is an incredible writer. She writes about women in various areas of distress: alcoholism, drug abuse, physical abuse, mental illness. The first story in the book "Squandering the Blue," was so poignant, so real, so sharp, it devastated me. I put the book aside after that. Sometimes things this truthful, hurt. I picked the book up again and found the other stories to be fantastic. She sheds light in a unique way on modern life. I gave it four stars only because some of the descriptions and storylines started to sound a bit redundant. If you need to study a writer who can get a mood into her work--study this one.
March 17, 2025
Braverman not only paints with her words, she creates a landscape you can touch , smell and feel in your heart. Her colors are almost living entities.
The stories themselves are not easy to read. It’s probably best to read a few at a time.
The stories themselves are not easy to read. It’s probably best to read a few at a time.
November 5, 2019
2.5 stars. These stories didn’t work for me for some reason. All the elements were there but the stories didn’t really penetrate. I found it mainly a chore to read.
February 28, 2021
Realistic stories ahead of it's time.
June 27, 2011
The stories have several elements in common. They take place in California, with scenes in Hawaii. The reveal the inner lives of women, some of whom are depressed, desperate, and even psychotic. And they allude to primary colors often, usually blue. The language is dense, poetic. It requires a close reading and a visualization. Curious, how a room can convey its past occupants, their moods, and their fate.
December 18, 2015
Kate Braverman is pure brilliance! I am reading through all of her books! Powerful, explosive, magnetic, like being in the middle of the best concert of your life on hallucinogenics! Her language is unparalleled and mesmerizing! Just get a copy of any book of Braverman's and let go of anything else you had to do. You won't be able to walk away once you begin!
March 29, 2022
A mixed bag, but forever in awe of the absolutely brilliant Tall Tales of the Mekong Delta, all shattered glasses of vodka cutting one's feet to ribbons as one attempts, in futility, to find the door out. One of the strongest portrayals of the depths of raw, nihilistic alcoholism ever to be bled in 90 proof blood across the page.
December 21, 2011
So incredibly sad, with too few moments of redemption. Not an easy or enjoyable read.
June 20, 2014
Accurately details 50's/60's sensibilities. Antidote to social media where everyone "Likes" mothers, dads, daughters, sons, cats, Jesus, political figures, whatever.
Beautifully written.
Beautifully written.
May 7, 2021
Stunning
December 24, 2008
Short stories.
Displaying 1 - 27 of 27 reviews