The Speculation of Queer Love: A Review of How It Works Out by Myriam Lacroix

FOR THE READER:

How it Works Out is a speculative, absurdist novel at heart. Myriam and Allison are queer lovers, but their love is anything but your average girl-meets-girl story. In the first section, "The Meaning of Life," they find a baby in the alley behind their apartment building, only to later run afoul of the baby's real mother, a woman unhappy in her marriage who tucked the baby in an alley after her loutish husband yells homophobic slurs at a comedy night and gets in a fight. The second story, "Love Bun," has both women and their children showing a taste for human flesh. In part three, they are a dog and a praying mantis. In "How it Works Out," they take up running, and in "The Sequel," they are influencers. The book inventively, humorously, looks at all the ways a couple can go, from the mundane to the absurd to the frightening.

Each sentence of the book is packed with possibility, however far-fetched it may seem, however far it strays from the inciting words. "The possibility that Jewel will give up her stable hetero relationship and take a chance on an aging prairie nerd dyke who's been dumped by girls far less clever or dewy-looking, girls whose sweaters smelled like rabbit litter or whose entire personalities were founded on their food allergies," Allison muses in the first person in "Anthropocene," a world in which she works for Myriam, a high-powered exec in an air-conditioning company ruining the world.

Sex is a given in all of these scenarios, and Lacroix has a knack for making it hot. Whether it involves BDSM and boss-underling power dynamics, or the eating of flesh, or faces turning into monstrous growths, the chemistry between the main characters never fails.

This book isn't exactly a novel-in-stories, and it's not exactly as short story collection. It is more a beginning point and all the possible ways the ball can roll from there, laid out for us in ludicrous detail.

I absolutely loved reading these, but the last story, "The Feature" in which Myriam and Allison are merely characters in a film, played by other characters entirely, was a little baffling to me. I felt empathy for the main character, FF (so named for her "face like a fetus" as the other actors in her school liked to say) who suffered enormous and grave indignities on her way to playing the character of Myriam in a screen adaptation of the previous story "Love Bun," but I failed to understand the piece in any real way. I'm not sure what was going on with her face, to be honest, which swelled, and developed fangs, and was not in the realm of realism in any way. I don't ever mind the fantastic, but there felt like there was little grounding in any reality to hold onto in this story.

Overall, this book was 4 our of 5 stars for me because the last story didn't pull things together in any way that felt cohesive to me, or completely land for me. However, the inventiveness, the absurdity, and the sheer joy of creation I felt while reading it made it a really strong book.

FOR THE WRITER:

We should all be so willing to go out on a limb with our stories as Myriam Lacroix. This book is a testament to creativity, to breaking molds, and to imagination. It's a simple concept -- what are all the ways this relationship could happen? -- made into a wild ride of a novel. Lacroix takes two lovers and builds entire world around them -- from a climate change future to a body horror film set that gets a little too real. This book is what you get when the seed of an idea comes to you and you let it drift into any and all of the places it could possibly go.