Blueprints for Building Better Girls

In Blueprints for Building Better Girls, Elissa Schappell, contributing editor for Vanity Fair magazine, presents eight short stories centered around timeless issues of being a woman—motherhood, miscarriages, and sexual development to name a few—recasting them with an edgy, dark humor. One story tells of a young woman, Charlotte, who gets drunk with her Alzheimer's-afflicted grandfather after being raped. In another, a girl named Heather incites her boyfriend into rough sex by teasing him about his former fatness. Characters recur at various points of their lives throughout the collection, like Charlotte who appears initially as a Southern college student and later as a New York stay-at-home mom. Most of Schappell's characters wrestle with societal expectations of women. Should a mother in today's world return to work or stay home and raise her children? Can she keep up with a younger generation of ambitious, childless women? Should a woman emotionally nurture the man in her life? Should she even have a man in her life? Schappell keeps sentimentality to a minimum by dismantling timeworn gender stereotypes through her characters' toughness and wit, but many of these stories are as heartbreaking as they are funny. Of course there‘s no real blueprint for building better girls, but in this collection, Schappell builds better portraits of womanhood.