Reviewstack: Call It Anything But Love, by Amanda Coreishy

Bittersweet stories with gravity.

Call It Anything But Love by Amanda Coreishy is set in ‘90s Trinidad, and several of its stories grapple with the Muslim practice of polygyny. As a white, non-Muslim, monogamous American, I expected to enter the book as a foreign observer and learn. It’s one thing to observe modern polyamorous relationships as an act of sexual liberation, but how do they function within the context of religious doctrine, especially in modern society when the subjects of sexual liberty and equality are more prominent?

This is where the book shines, because Coreishy’s response is a deeply nuanced, unexpectedly bittersweet version of “it’s complicated.”

I felt silly having approached the book as an outsider, because it quickly became clear that something being a “cultural fact” doesn’t make it any easier for people to accept or adjust to. Their concerns and reactions echoed my own, and each character’s portrait is so intimately drawn, I couldn’t help but sympathize with all of them.

The book is labeled as “short stories,” but I’d call it a novel. Something significant would be lost from skipping stories or reading them out of sequence. Sometimes I tried to make myself think of the chapter I was reading as a standalone short story, but I got so wrapped up in the chapter and how it reflected on or impacted the other chapters that I always forgot about my little mindset experiment. There are a couple of chapters that could work as short stories, but even the more loosely connected pieces gain depth and meaning from their relation to others.

So this is a book of “short stories” in as much as each of us is the lead in our own story, and our story is affected in turn by the leads and trajectories of other stories.

I sometimes wished the latter stories were as tightly connected as the earlier ones, but another strong through line in this book is one’s feeling of separateness in relation to others—ironically most apparent in the romantic relationships, which speaks to the book’s overall bittersweet flavor.

I finished this book feeling that family can be terribly complicated, but it can also be beautiful, despite—or sometimes because of—its complications. Even now, weeks after finishing the book, I sometimes think about Nadira and Judith, standing on either side of a strange familial chasm, and how these women’s joys and sorrows mirrored and contrasted each other, and how hatred and jealousy can also be tinged with compassion and even a little joy.

Call It Anything But Love is about our gravitational pull on each other. It tangles the reader in the interconnectedness of people’s lives, even at a distance, after having met and grown apart (in one of my favorite stories of the collection), or having never met at all.

I highly recommend Call It Anything But Love by Amanda Coreishy, which she’s giving away for free here:

Coreishy’s upcoming book Reputation continues the stories of some of the characters from her first book, and I’m so excited catch up with them.

Follow Amanda Coreishy here on Substack!