Admit this to no one : stories

Admit this to no one Stories

Leslie Pietrzyk, 1961-

Book - 2021

In Admit This to No One, we meet a group of women connected to a central figure either personally or professionally, and for better or for worse--an all-powerful and elusive Speaker of the House, whose political career has only stopped short of being Presidential due to his myriad extra-marital affairs. The Speaker's daughters from his several failed marriages have a complicated relationship with him to say the least--alternating between longing for his affection or bristling with resentment, and occasionally relief at being left out of the spotlight. His oldest daughter Lexie, from his "real family, the first one," once his favorite who knew the real him, is now an adult who has blown up her career due to a sex scandal of he...r own. His long-time fixer and keeper of secrets, Mary-Grace, is relentless and uncompromising in her devotion to him, making the lives of the interns and aides under her purview in the Capitol miserable. When the Speaker's life is in danger, the disparate women in his life will collide for the first time, but can their relationships be repaired?These stories show us how Washington, D.C.'s true currency is power, but power is inextricable from oppression-- D.C. is a city divided, not just by red or blue, right or left, but Black and white. Segregated by income and opportunity, but also physically by bridges and rivers, and police vehicles, Leslie Pietrzyk casts an unflinching and exacting gaze on her characters, as they grapple with the ways they have upheld white supremacy and misogyny. Shocking and profound, Pietrzyk writes with an emotional urgency about what happens when the bonds of family and duty are pushed to the limit, and how if individuals re-evaluate their own beliefs and actions there is a path forward.

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Subjects
Politicians > Washington (D.C.) > Fiction.
Fathers and daughters > Washington (D.C.) > Fiction.
Adultery > Fiction.
Non-consensual non-monogamy.
Non-monogamy.
United States > Politics and government > Fiction.
Political fiction.
Short stories.
Genres
Political fiction
Short stories
Published
Los Angeles, CA : Unnamed Press [2021]
Language
English
Main Author
Leslie Pietrzyk, 1961- (author)
Edition
First edition
Physical Description
255 pages ; 21 cm
ISBN
9781951213411
  • Till death do us part
  • Wealth management
  • We always start with the seduction
  • Stay there
  • I believe in Mary Worth
  • People love a view
  • This isn't who we are
  • Hat trick
  • Anything you want
  • Green in judgment
  • My father raised me
  • Admit this to no one
  • Kill the fatted calf
  • Every man in history.
Review by Booklist Review

Pietrzyk returns to the short story after the novel Silver Girl (2018) and the collection This Angel on My Chest (2015), winner of the Drue Heinz Literature Prize. Here she tells twisted tales of Washington, D.C.'s elite. Pietrzyk doesn't shy away from any subject, no matter how sensitive, using her 14 loosely connected stories and their characters to tackle racism, abortion, and sexual assault. From the rebellious teenage daughter of the Speaker of the House, to the staff member who wants to sleep with her boss to the college friends reconnecting at a hockey game, all Pietrzyk's characters have defined personalities and motivations that keep the pages turning. Her witty style and assured voice bring insight and relatability to the homes of the powerful and proletarian alike. Taken individually or as a whole, these complex, daring stories by an innovative and skillful fiction writer will both entertain and shock.

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Pietrzyk dissects the messy interpersonal power dynamics of Washington, D.C., in this sharp debut collection of linked stories. In the opener, "Til Death Do Us Part," an unnamed Speaker of the House, whose sex scandals adjusted his status from "not-president" to "never-president," is stabbed while meeting his 15-year-old daughter for dinner at the Kennedy Center. His 40-year-old daughter, Lexie, who initially assumes the assailant was one of the Speaker's exes, hears the news in "Stay There," and abruptly departs her own art opening to visit him at the hospital. The Speaker's exceptionally competent, longtime senior staffer, Mary-Grace, stars in "I Believe in Mary Worth," where she butts heads with an eager young female new hire, and the title story, which flashes back to the Speaker's doomed presidential run in 1992. Some stories move beyond the Speaker's family, including "People Love a View," where a couple on a first date witness an increasingly tense traffic stop, and "This Isn't Who We Are," in which a white, middle-class "Northern Virginia" woman, in a series of sentences starting with the word "pretend" ("Pretend that your desire to compliment her hair isn't about you"), wrestles with her implicit racism and classism. Throughout, Pietrzyk writes with insight and wit, and makes even tertiary characters feel fully developed. This ambitious work is pulled off with verve. Agent: Kerry D'Agostino, Curtis Brown Literary. (Nov.)

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review

A collection of stories set in Washington, D.C., full of scandal and insider details. "Official DC is mindful of insignificant beginnings, of small decisions that escalate into epic downfalls. Five men break into an office one June night in 1972. A pretty girl wears a blue dress from the Gap." And in Pietrzyk's razor-sharp version of the city, the insignificant beginning is a 15-year-old girl going to meet her father at the bar in the Kennedy Center. Her father turns out to be the Speaker of the House, and their meet-up ends with both of them on the way to the hospital following an attack. Eight of the remaining stories circle around this incident and these characters. At an art opening in Durham, North Carolina, the speaker's estranged adult daughter by a previous marriage hears of the attack and jumps in the car to drive up to Washington with her much younger boyfriend. The speaker's top staffer, who has been cleaning up his messes for decades, learns of the stabbing and rushes to the hospital to manage the potential collision of present and former wives and numerous half siblings. Interspersed with the speaker stories are five bonus tracks with different characters, several dealing directly with issues of White privilege. "People Love a View," a particularly interesting one, places a couple on their first date at the scene of a traffic stop with a cop who's "a Hollywood stereotype" and an older Black man with a big dog in the car. "Wait. Shouldn't I film this?" asks the woman, and sure enough, a terrible series of events, though not the ones we expect, unfolds. "Green in Judgment," set entirely in a grocery checkout line, torques its drama with metafictional techniques, each section given a label such as "Every story needs a villain, possibly more than one if the story is eighteen pages or longer," "Every story needs one bad decision," and "Every story needs one coincidence. (Only one)." An exciting collection bristling with intelligence, political awareness, and psychological complexity. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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