A Brit a Day [#888]

Meet Lauren Fox, author of at least 2 novels and this brilliant short story that I stumbled upon on Salon.com the other day:

http://www.salon.com/2012/09/08/fiction_ongry_by_lauren_fox/

Now here's a huuuuuge stretch--Lauren gets to be Brit of the Day by virtue of being married to a guy from Dublin.  I know that's beyond suspect as Britishness goes, but I just had to get her onto this blog.  After all, this blog started off as a platform for my own short stories a million years ago, and you see how far that got.  People like Lauren remind me that there are enough awesome writers out there, writing about the things that needle at me, that I don't have to add my warbling voice to the many others who are singing the song in tune.

Here is how Lauren describes herself on her website:

I was born in a suburb of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, into a family full of love, support, and very little grist for the dramatic mill. I knew from an early age that I wanted to be a writer, and decided that my best bet was to make stuff up. My first attempts at fiction included a tragic story about a blind Mexican orphan, and a tragic tale about a horse who dies, tragically, in a barn fire. 

 By the time I got to college and enrolled in a few creative writing classes, I learned the adage, “write what you know,” and began churning out stories about the unhappy love lives of young, thin-skinned, near-sighted, sarcastic, curly haired girls. My first published short story, which appeared in a nationally distributed college magazine, used the structure of the game show Jeopardy! to trace the demise of a relationship. (I’ll take ‘the slow erosion of my self-esteem’ for $200, Alex.) I was pleased that I had finally created fiction out of my two favorite pastimes: tv-watching and borderline obsessive pining over unavailable men. 

 After college I moved around a bit, living in Washington, DC and then for a while back in Madison, Wisconsin, bravely conducting field research for my stories about lonely women in their twenties who can’t find a date. In graduate school in Minneapolis, I took a brief detour from fiction and began writing about my family’s history and the Holocaust, which was fun. 

 When I was twenty-six, I met a nice boy from Dublin who put an end to my anthropological studies of loneliness and heartbreak. Luckily, I had gathered enough material to last for a while.

In other words, sisters, she opens her heart and our story spills out.