Anna Bruno: Can Women Win in Literature?
Photograph by Nicole Lorenson Anna Bruno and I lived in the same town for four years—both attending the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, though at different times— but we didn’t meet until we became new mothers anticipating the publication of our novels along with the arrival of little ones. Apparently, books and babies come in pairs.
Her debut novel, Ordinary Hazards, is narrated by a mother named Emma, who spends one night at a bar meditating on the disintegration of her marriage and family.
The Final Final is a cozy bar with a jukebox, a pool table, and a room full of people who want to forget whatever happened that day. There, Emma finds comfort in the steady hand of the longtime bartender, her friend’s ten-year-old daughter who draws ponies in a dark booth, idle conversation with her ex’s friends, and memories of her marriage before it fell apart.
As Emma struggles to balance her success in the business world with small-town family life, this bar becomes not only a “home away from home,” but a place where she goes to remember what her home used to be, before she left her marriage to live in a small apartment with her beloved dog.
As I read this moving and bold novel, I found myself wishing I too could return to the past. One before our children and before the pandemic, where Anna and I
