All 11 short stories in “Amphibians,” the third book by Lara Tupper ’95, highlight a woman at a point in her life that could appropriately be described as amphibious. These moments are vivid and immediate, slippery and hard to pin down, occupying two spaces at once and not quite feeling at home in either. They’re snapshots of the lives of complex characters at moments of self-reflection, exploration, and transformation.

In many cases, the book’s women are far from their homes. In dealing with displacement, they lose their sense of self in the absence of people who know them. People often define themselves by their routines, friends, and normal lives, but by removing her characters from their comfort zones and placing them somewhere entirely new, Tupper cuts through their facade and grasps the core of who they really are. In the story “Belly Dancing,” a woman lives by herself in Dubai, half a world away from anyone who knows her. 

“The joy of travel is the joy of reinventing yourself, abandoning all that you were before,” Tupper writes. “But maybe it isn’t healthy to live like this, so buoyant, so far from people who tell her who she really is.”

In centering all her stories on women, Tupper also explores the added pressure on women to define themselves by external factors: appearances, surroundings, relationships, and the opinions of others. In her first story, the titular “Amphibians,” a young girl begins to understand this subliminal expectation.

“There’s no room for the girl in this kind of talking,” Tupper writes. “She practices in her head but by the time she’s ready they aren’t talking about the same thing anymore. When she tries to slide in, they talk over her. She’ll never be loud enough.”  

In other stories, older women work to rediscover who they are after leaving behind the familiar. 

“She doesn’t know what she looks like anymore,” Tupper writes about the protagonist of “Belly Dancing.” “She knows how to reflect, how to become what they want to see.”

What comes after this moment of realization, this recognition that maybe these women don’t know themselves as well as they think they do, varies depending on the story, but often ends up in a place of discontentment. Some women realize they no longer enjoy the careers they’ve spent years pursuing, feeling trapped in a life they don’t want anymore, grappling with the daunting prospect of starting over. Other women realize their relationships have deteriorated over the years into something unrecognizable and unfulfilling. Their spouses are distant and unfamiliar, and the space between them seems unsurmountable. In “Good Neighbors,” a woman and her husband realize they’ve grown apart on a family vacation. 

“When you come back he’s in bed and the clock has been turned toward the wall,” Tupper writes. “His hands are folded on his stomach like a vampire. You keep your eyes open and don’t reach for him. He doesn’t reach for you.”

In most of the stories, the women don’t move past the feelings of dissatisfaction by the end. Mostly, they dwell in those uncomfortable spaces of awareness and uncertainty, narrating with bravery and honesty. 

The problems the characters are dealing with, including isolation, doubt, and unhappiness, are universal to humanity. We are all constantly rediscovering ourselves, redefining our lives and what’s important to us. Often, the conclusions we draw are hard to face; they require change and disruption, and therefore go ignored. These characters, however, are facing these issues head on. Tupper’s characters don’t always have answers, or even productive reactions, but they are honest and vulnerable with themselves. They’re brave enough to admit their unhappiness, which makes them compelling, but they’re human enough to not know what to do about it, which makes them real. 

In the first and last stories, the women are actually able to do something about their conflicts. The answer that both characters come to is one of escape: removal, however brief, from the life that stifles them. In both stories, the characters escape into the water, which hearkens back to the animals the book is named for. In “Amphibians,” a girl leaves her family to swim.

“She wasn’t cold,” Tupper writes. “They were somewhere in the dark, within reach. (Voices, splashing.) How easy the water felt against her open skin. How she stayed away from them, treading.”

In “Good Neighbors,” the author’s tactile descriptions convey a similar feeling of liberation.

“You move before your brain can catch up, down the steps and towards the sound,” Tupper writes. “Wet sand on wool socks, cold seeping through. (How delicious the change in sensation.) You touch the rod, the hook, the loose knot. Your fingers are fast, like you’ve done this before…The dinghy heaves and bobs, pushing itself away, trailing the rope behind.”

These are the most cathartic moments in the book because they capture pure, instinctual reactions. That frantic feeling of being trapped within your own life is a familiar one, and it was such a release to see characters experience it, then react by simply leaving. The real problems are still unsolved, but at least these women are empowered enough to escape them. 

The language in these excerpts is vivid and purposeful, and the entire book is grounded in similarly immediate prose. In keeping with the message of the book, the language is blunt, quick, and honest, holding the words to the same standards as the characters. The one place where the prose allows itself to linger, however, is in the lush descriptions of the setting, given how important the sense of place is in these stories.

Maine is often the characters’ one true home and the place where they feel most comfortable, so the book spends the most time situating them there.

“When the sun sets, golds and pinks you want to save on your phone, you stay outside even when you need a sweater,” Tupper writes. “He stays inside reading. The wind makes the fog fade, and the night sky clears. Under the moon, the dinghy rocks in the dark and that’s how you know the tide’s coming in. You hear the creak of the small boat budging over and over in the sand.”

“Amphibians” is a series of congruent stories that grapple with the complexity of understanding the self and the life created around it and, subsequently, the precarious nature of changing that life if it’s insufficient. Tupper elegantly lays her characters’ souls bare in moments of striking vulnerability and honesty, and we watch as they try to make sense of who they’ve become. We, the readers, see ourselves in them, in their flaws and uncertainty, but also in their quiet strength and integrity. It is a book that asks us to watch characters question everything in their lives, and in so doing, turns the questions back on us. 

 

Ella Tierney can be reached at etierney@wesleyan.edu.