Drinking Coffee Elsewhere

“The book told of kamikaze pilots, flying off to their suicide missions…The pilots had made a pledge to the emperor, and they’d kept their promises. She remembered how she’d marveled when she’d read it, amazed that anyone would do such a thing; how—in the all-knowing arrogance of youth—she’d been certain that given the same circumstances, she would have done something different.” –“Geese” (233)

Drinking Coffee Elsewhere by ZZ Packer

Essential points: The stories of Drinking Coffee Elsewhere are stories of growing up. Whether a troop of Brownies contending with the intersecting “isms” under which they will live their lives, or a girl who, after running away to find her ultimately evanescent mother, nonetheless discovers fierce maternal power both inside and outside of herself, or an earnest member of the high school debate team dragged to the Million Man March with his itinerant father, the characters central to these stories thrust themselves into the wider world curiously, almost tauntingly, as if daring it to try them on for size. But these stories are not optimistic. Even while the reader watches as slivers of strength harden in the various characters’ spines, external forces batter these same characters, mocking them, undoing them. Written in language that is best left to speak for itself—“Just as she thought that the world might end that very night, sunlight illuminated the windows, clear as shellac, bright as if trying to wake her” (235)—these stories of leaving the nest are by and large un-hackneyed tales that vigorously investigate what it means to be an actor in the world.

Subjects this book includes that some readers may be sensitive to (but which others will be thrilled to find discussed in their literature!): Homophobia, racism, prejudice against differently abled people, “correctional facilities” for at-risk youth, sex work.