Reflecting on the long procession of disappointing and superficial affairs she's had, she realizes that her search for identity through the choice of a lover has left her feeling hollow and helpless. She wonders if she is shrinking herself and stooping like the tall woman she observes in the store, in order to accommodate the shortcomings of her partners. And she fears that she will not have the resolve to break away from another unhappy relationship. Running through all the stories is a sense of displacement and foreboding. It manifests itself literally in the blackening of the sun, an image Brubaker borrows from Dylan Horrocks.
Displacement reverberates through the stories because of their similarity.
Each is about a different set of characters, different names and appearance, but very similar. Motifs, like the holdup man and the black eye, recur in different ways in the stories. Brubaker's writing is, as always, spare and intense. As pessimistic as any comic book writer is capable of being, but liberating because of his compassion for his characters and his courage in facing disconcerting truths. His fictional writing has always seemed auto-biographical, but when he assumes the female perspective here, he remains convincing and insightful.