A review by maxgardner
Here's Your Hat What's Your Hurry by Elizabeth McCracken

4.0

This is such a solid collection of stories, and though there are definitely a few that particularly stand out, I enjoyed all of them. I appreciate that so many of them have an unusual element to them, oftentimes revealed subtly and with indifference—a woman who opens her body as a canvas for a tattoo artist, a former circus performer who decides to take into her family's home one of her old circus friends, a wayward older woman who works her way into distant family members' homes. But they all are grounded in reality and mundaneness and touch on universal truths, which give them a human element I felt I could connect with.

Here are some thoughts on the ones that stood out for me (will add more):

It's Bad Luck To Die
This is one of my favorites from the collection because it's humorous and also touches on a theme that I feel I can connect with pretty well—finding acceptance and love for a body that you feel uncomfortable in. Sometimes that means defining your own vision of beauty, even if it's forged from the beauty someone else recognizes in you and guides you to see.

Favorite quotes

Like all good mothers, she always knew the worst was going to happen and was disappointed and relieved when it finally did.

All she wanted was for me to become miraculously blank.

My mother was wrong. I never felt like a freak because of my height: I felt like a ghost haunting too much space... It's like when you move into a new place, and despite the lease and despite the rent you've paid, the place doesn't feel like home and you're not sure you want to stay... Well, getting a tattoo—it's like hanging drapes, or laying carpet, or driving that first nail into the fresh plaster: it's deciding you've moved in.

...I am not a museum, not yet, I'm a love letter, a love letter.