Welcome to another installment of If My Book, the Monkeybicycle feature in which authors compare their recently released books to weird things. This week Lauren Woods writes about The Great Grown-Up Game of Make-Believe, her new story collection out from Autumn House Press.
If The Great Grown-Up Game of Make-Believe were an apartment, its pieces would be cobbled together over the years—an old and (previously) unloved piano, a warm, well-trodden rug, a painting of a castle you saw once while traveling alone at twenty, a cat you didn’t ask for but that found its way inside anyway.
If The Great Grown-Up Game… were a toe, it would like to dip first. It might not like to rush into the water. It might like, instead, to test the temperature and let the cold waves come to it.
If The Great Grown-Up Game… were an animal, it would be a deer munching leaves in a garden that watches and then comes at you sideways.
If The Great Grown-Up Game… were a scent, it might be the orange Italian body wash you bought at age eighteen and told yourself that must be how Italy smells, but you only use it twice a year now when you visit your childhood home, and there it sits, decades later, and you realize each time, oh, this was how you must have smelled.
If The Great Grown-Up Game… were a song, it would be the one you listened to first in a tiny record shop in the nineties, arms crossed, nodding your head, promising yourself that this would be the song that would change your life.
If The Great Grown-Up Game… were a child, it would be the kind of child who skips class, only to go to the library to choose her own books.
If The Great Grown-Up Game… were a train, it would be an overnight one, to Prague, to Aswan, to anywhere, where you go to sleep and wake up a new person entirely, just as you’d hoped.
If The Great Grown-Up Game… were a memory, it would be vivid but spotty and unreliable.
If The Great Grown-Up Game… were a friend, it would be the one you love because you grew up together, who goes on and on after a few drinks, who forgets the points of her stories.
Lauren D. Woods is the author of The Great Grown-Up Game of Make-Believe, a short story collection that won the 2024 Autumn House Fiction Prize. She lives in Washington, DC with her husband, four children, cats, and a guinea pig. She is the founder of LitBox, DC’s first book vending machine, which sells books exclusively by DC-area authors. Order The Great Grown-Up Game of Make-Believe here.