Goldie Goldbloom (left) seems to be an author of extremes and contradictions. After reading the first two stories in her new collection, You Lose These and Other Stories, I had to flip to the front and read both her biography and her list of achievements. However I didn’t find enough for me to understand how she could bring such insight to characters as varied as a small girl in outback Australia and an Orthodox Jewish mother struggling with her lesbianism. So I googled her. She grew up in Western Australia, but has been living as a Chassidic Jew in Chicago for the past 18 years. Currently working as a mentor for queer and transgender youth, she has also studied botany and midwifery. With such diverse talents as these I can appreciate how her stories encompass all walks of life, and why they most particularly look at those in need and at the bottom of the social ladder.

In many of the stories it’s as if we have a glimpse for a few pages into the very heart of the characters’ conscious thoughts. Yet what shows through are their subconscious motivations. Every story is about someone lost; no one quite fits in, or is missing something that they feel they need to fit in. It doesn’t matter whether the character is a mother desperately trying to make her daughter’s wedding, a high school student falling in love with her host father or a cancer survivor meeting her prospective groom – every story comes down to innocence and that moment of losing it.

The stories show, sometimes brutally, that it doesn’t matter how old we are, in some way we are always innocent in our view of the world until one day something comes along to shatter our rose-coloured glasses. Whether this is a good or a bad thing is left up to the reader.

Kate Rockstrom is from Readings Carlton.

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