Treats - Lara Williams

'Dance like nobody gives a crap. Drink like you don't have a family to go home to': Lara Williams’ debut collection is a bitterly funny answer to the hollow clichés of self-help and mindfulness. The character studies which make up Treats reveal individuals forced into cookie-cutter roles by the expectations of the people around them; some kick against the constraints and others go with the flow, but there are few happy endings on offer.

As with novels like Chris Killen’s In Real Life, and Everyone Knows This is Nowhere by Alice Furse, Williams’ stories occupy the hinterland that stretches out between graduation and proper adulthood. Rather than setting off into the real world with a sense of purpose, her characters drift into unpromising situations, with an assumption that life will be ‘dominated by spreadsheets, divorce and bad dates’. In One of Those Life Things, a character sees their ‘options scatter like playing cards' in front of her. There is a glimpse of possibility, as they ask ‘what is the narrative here?' but this is rapidly crushed by a positive pregnancy test ('a bloody presumptuous lexicography'). Frozen, the character finds herself reverting to stock reactions: 'You are reading lines from Just Seventeen. You are a freeze-frame from Jackie'. Disassociated from the reality of her situation, she is compelled to play a role, without the confidence or agency to choose not to. Compounding the situation, she finds herself living in 'Hell' – a student district, where she is kept awake at nights by the sound of screaming. Reporting the problem, she is simply told 'if you don't want to live in hell, then I suggest you move'.

Other characters take a more existential view of their situations. In It Begins, a character enduring an obnoxious date suddenly decides:  'I don't have to listen to this shit… and at once, you realise you don't have to'. In Taxidermy, a character’s life is broken down, and put back together in 3 pages: 'At 28 Neala lost her boyfriend. At 29 she lost her job. At 30 she lost her full head of hair'. Counter-intuitively, this series of losses allows Neala to create a space in which she can be free and bohemian - but her baldness is a visible sign of difference, which limits her ability to ever move back into the mainstream of society.

Williams is very aware of the space allocated to women in society. Toxic Shock Syndrome depicts a 'big' woman, constantly always aware of how much space she occupies, and whether people feel she is entitled to it. This view becomes internalised, to the point where she believes her very presence can be an imposition. In the title story, an older character names Elaine carries out secret acts of kindness for herself and others. Because she is unobtrusive, her kindness and thoughtfulness is rarely reciprocated - she is taken for granted by others. Her role and her behaviour don't match, and so people don't see the interesting character beneath the surface.

Another older character’s experience highlights the risk of trying to escape their appointed role. In ‘It’s a Shame About Ray’, the title character decides to ‘give up answering questions’, adopting a forced, studied laid back-ness, which comes close to an early onset midlife crisis. His attempts to rekindle his carefree youth end have predictably disastrous consequences.

There are examples of a rawer existence, characters who sit outside of normal categories, such as Morag in A Lover's Guide to Meeting Shy Girls, who eats cubes of raw beetroot, with her 'cruel, unforgiving laugh' and 'beetroot juice smeared across her mouth and fingers, like a recently devoured kill'. As with Neala, the price of this independence is a visible otherness which disconcerts the people around her.

Treats is a fast-paced collection, showing the influence of flash fiction. Williams peppers her character studies with arresting phrases: one character is 'dressed head to toe in black, like some sort of devastating widow'; another 'didn't mind so much being sexually frustrated. Being a dancer was like being a little bit repressed, always'. Anxiety and uneasiness is never far from the surface. In Here's To You, a young woman observes that ‘anxiety was a lousy warm-up. She wanted to cut straight to the depression'. In Safe Spaces, Williams shows that sex, paranoia and insecurity have a way of creeping in and undermining whatever temporary peace her characters might find.

The treats on offer in this collection are laced with bitterness and regret, but there is an enjoyable sharpness and clarity in Williams’ writing, and a hint of the surreal lurking beneath the surface, as in the story of a man who fantasises about his partner dressing as a penguin and incubating an egg. Writing from millennials increasingly reflects the sense of life choices narrowing, and adult life as a disappointment. Treats is a snapshot of an increasingly disaffected generation.