Abstract
The Most Anonymous State and Other Stories is a collection of ten short stories all prepossessed with the idea of the “immaculate recreation” — of the human desire to painstakingly replicate reality as a gateway for fantasy in love, selfhood, and intimacy. The female protagonists in my work devote their lives to this “immaculate recreation,” controlling obsessively the details of how they are seen, heard, and understood. In doing so, they create hyper-realized versions of their own identities and perceptions of their femininity as a way to control and protect their needs, desires, and fears. One character lies about her age and invites a new boyfriend to gamble in Atlantic City, a world she pretends to know. Another presents herself as Frida Kahlo’s granddaughter to a man in a bar; another gives herself a dramatic makeover to seduce a man she meets online. In another still, a grieving ex-girlfriend obsessively re-creates the narrative of an old relationship after discovering her ex has tragically died. My work interrogates the hubris and the disparity between one’s internal and external character, through the lens of multicultural American-born girls and women. My experience growing up between cultures directly motivates the truths I seek to uncover in my work. In this collection characters are almost always “in transit,” holding multiple identities at equal length, and the challenges and freedoms that come from existing in a space that is neither here nor there. The Most Anonymous State and Other Stories poses the question — to whom does an identity belong?