From Rosamond Lehmann to Tama Janowitz, women writers have sought to distil the modern feminine experience in tales that curl and pulse. Louise Marburg, who wrote You Have Reached Your Destination during the revelatory extremity of the Covid-19 lockdown, achieves a similar intensity as she peels away layers of so-called normality and respectability to reveal the mess that lies beneath. In this new collection, Marburg’s protagonists are all caught in the same dilemma. You Have Reached Your Destination is a deftly drawn series of esquisses, capturing women where they are, whether they want to be there or not.

Marburg shades and sketches the details of how her characters have reached each of their particular destinations, placing them in worlds that are authentic, unique, and intimate. In the story that gives the collection its uncanny title, Amelia visits her childhood home, where her church-going mother used to beat her brother and then returns to her now-adult brother’s house in an Uber. The GPS announces her arrival. Seeing Amelia’s sweating palms, the Uber driver double-checks if it is where she wants to be. “No, it’s not,” she answers. “But here I am anyway.”

These worlds are not especially cosy. Marburg’s women deal with corporeal realities of childlessness, sexual intimidation, and the ravages of menopause. They confront misogynistic cruelty, ageism, and abandonment; they shoulder the burden of caring for ageing parents. Marburg’s characters run the lifespan’s gamut, from 12-year-old Katie, whose adored elder sister transmogrifies into her drunken mother, to 91-year-old June, whose new neighbours remind her viscerally of her own abusive marriage. Marburg’s characters grow older, drink too much, tell lies, and love imperfectly. Their complicated lives mask fear, shame, loneliness and brutality.

Several stories focus on parents who, having abandoned their children or been unkind, abusive or neglectful, suddenly want reconciliation. We travel alongside the daughters, and see, in turn, their exasperation, grief, avoidance, and resignation. The disappointment of an unfulfilled life, at any age, is sharply described. “You don’t love these years?” asks Eve, the central character in the story “Dance, Rockettes,” about a couple navigating midlife. Her husband answers, “I like these years fine.” She responds, “But they’re not what you imagined for yourself.” This is uncomfortable reading, and the better for it.

The book tricks and unsettles by turns. Characters turn out to be imposters and strangers: A woman in a bar is a man. The brother of a party host turns out to have never even met him. A woman who claims to have been a Rockette says she “can’t do a high kick to save my life.” Unpredictable as life itself, each story conceals and reveals a version of the truth.

Spirituality brings little comfort. Clairvoyants and seers know no more than churchgoers. They are exposed in turn as charlatans and child-beaters. Women seek to escape the lives they do not want, yet their agency appears almost by chance, in random turns of events or accidental meetings. Gretchen, meeting a psychic, wails, “I don’t know what I want…I used to know but it didn’t work out. Why doesn’t anything fucking work out?” Elaine, finishing a bag of chips, “was still hungry for something, she didn’t know what.” Destiny is a random anonymous note, an arbitrary meeting at a party, an embryo’s one-in-four chance at viability.

With You Have Reached Your Destination, Marburg has delivered another superb collection. She seizes the haphazardness of women’s lives and imbues it with colour, messiness, bloody good jokes, desperation, and beauty.

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Louise Marburg is the author of two collections of stories, The Truth About Me (WTAW Press, 2018) and No Diving Allowed (Regal House, 2021), in addition to You Have Reached Your Destination, which won the 2022 Eastover Fiction Prize. Her work has appeared in Narrative, Ploughshares, STORY, The Hudson Review, and elsewhere. She lives in New York City with her husband, the artist Charles Marburg.

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Educated in the West Indies, Saudi Arabia, Scotland and Belgium, Elizabeth Smith studied modern languages at Durham University in England. She reads anything she can, especially pre-war books by obscure women and modern European writers. She lives in an old house on a small island where she often pretends it is 1936.