Reading Aimee LaBrie’s award-winning collection, Rage and Other Cages, is like hanging out with a whip-smart best friend who can read a room and throw out a zinger while everyone else is still shrugging off their coats. Unfiltered, cringy, hilarious, LaBrie’s stories center on women who can no longer contain the stew of regret, fear and impotence that has been simmering within for far too long. Their pots boileth over. 

LaBrie’s heroines have been seething for a while. Early disappointments have taken root and lie in wait as a triggers of later devastations. The teenager in “I Know What You Want to Do,” for instance, discovers that her misguided fumblings with a boy in the football bleachers are nothing like the romantic script she’s learned from books and movies. In “How to Act,” a theater major is informed by her mother, a former Maidenform bra model, that she will never be pretty enough to play the lead. The whisper-thin actress in “Rage” is told by an agent that she needs to lose five more pounds. 

As adults, these women struggle to find their centers. They’re underemployed, living in rundown houses—like Jenny Darling, a former child star turned real estate agent in “Curb Appeal,” who can’t make a sale or catch a break; with her dryer on the fritz she walks around in smelly damp clothes. Their lovers are irresponsible or married or creepy, like Nick in “Double Negative Boyfriend” who watches Hitchcock movies and sets his apartment building on fire.  

As frustration builds, their anger turns inward. From “Rage”: “My rage has a color and a shape—it’s bright orange and round like an egg. The rage doesn’t just happen when I turn on the news. It is triggered by almost any gurgle in my day […] I feel it in the tips of my fingers, as if I need to squeeze something very hard.”  They contort themselves, denying their own desires in order to conform to the expectations of others. In “Pygmalion, Before and After: A Weight Loss Journey®,” an obese woman stars in a reality-TV show. The producers make her up as unattractively as possible, insisting on unwashed hair and costuming her in ugly clothes and glasses she doesn’t need. To add to her degradation, they conspire to have her sneak off to McDonalds since “wouldn’t that be more interesting if she, like, ate three double cheeseburgers?” After her weight-loss surgery, when flaps of extra skin are the only reminders of who she used to be, she laments, “I miss food. I miss her. She’s gone.”

LaBrie’s mordant humor ripples throughout the collection. Fans of Lorrie Moore’s Self Help (1985) will recognize parallels in tone and craft: sarcasm, witticisms, people talking over one another, cinematic details, the use of confessional and second-person directives, as in Moore’s “How to Be An Other Woman” which famously opens with the enigmatic instruction “Meet in an expensive beige raincoat, on a pea-soupy night. Like a detective movie.”

But Rage and Other Cages reaches beyond what Moore called, in an interview with the Paris Review, “feminine emergencies”—domestic relationships, the painful processes of growing up and getting wise. La Brie’s narratives are layered and more complex. Nestled in the middle of all the funny stuff, LaBrie grapples with violence against women, abortion, body dysmorphia, grief and death.

LaBrie’s characters need to talk, to say what they think in the moment, to rail against the universe, to find the comedy in the ghastly. In “A Good Thing,” a Philadelphia nurse with a new job as an organ transplant coordinator, attends her boyfriend’s end-of-summer office party. She’s supposed to stick to light, inconsequential topics, like the weather, and avoid talking about fatal car accidents and other horror stories from her work. She launches into a “funny story” about a family, on vacation from China, whose five-year-old boy falls off the edge of the LOVE sculpture while his father takes a photo. At the hospital, when a coordinator explains brain death and organ donation, the father, not fluent in English, “replies ‘Yes, yes, I get it. We want brain transplant!’” No one laughs. They look at her as if she’s a monster. But she didn’t mean “‘funny’ like funny ha-ha; she meant ‘funny’ like awful funny.” She wants to tell her boyfriend’s appalled coworkers “that you have to talk about it this way; otherwise, you’d lie down on the floor and never get up.”

When they’ve finally had enough, the women in these stories erupt with physical violence: they weaponize their keys, they catalogue tricks they learned in Girls Scouts for their Rape Readiness badge. Their bags, weighted with bicycle locks, produce blood when bashed against a would-be attacker’s temple. In “Princess,” a bartender kidnapped by her ex-lover’s uncle escapes by hitting him over the head with his elderly mother’s Virgin Mary statue. In response to a date’s whispered request for “rape fantasies,” the narrator in “Whistling in the Dark” tells the one about an inept rapist who breaks into a woman’s apartment. She thwarts the attack, ties him up. Amidst his tears, she counsels him that he could be so much more. They almost hug as she releases him, without calling the police, back into the streets. As he stands in the glow of the moonlight, she looks down at him from her window; when he turns to wave, he’s flattened by a semi. 

Like rubberneckers at the scene of an accident, it’s impossible to look away from Rage and Other Cages. LaBrie’s stories grab you by the collar and won’t let go, reminders that life is a dramedy. Laugh if you can. Regret nothing. Use the rage. 

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Aimee LaBrie’s award-winning short stories have appeared in the Minnesota Review, Iron Horse Literary Review, StoryQuarterly, Cimarron Review, Pleiades, Beloit Fiction Journal, Permafrost Magazine, and others. Her short story collection, Wonderful Girl, was awarded the Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction and published by the University of North Texas Press in 2007. She teaches creative writing at Rutgers and works as the senior program administrator for Writers House.

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Lisa Slage Robinson writes to explore invisible landscapes and magical feminism. Named a finalist for Midwest Review’s Great Midwest Fiction Contest, her work appears in Atticus Review, Smokelong Quarterly, The Adroit Journal, PRISM International, Storm Cellar, Lit Pub, Necessary Fiction, Drizzle, Meat for Tea and elsewhere. Lisa serves as a board member for Autumn House Press and a reader for WTAW Press. In a previous life, she practiced law in the States and Canada. She lives in Pittsburgh with her husband and keeps the lights on for her two daughters who live in NYC and LA but still like to come home.