The first thing you’ll notice when you open Tara Isabel Zambrano’s Ruined a Little When We Are Born is just how many stories she’s managed to pack into this slim volume. There are more than three dozen of them, some running less than two pages as part of her continued practice of flash fiction, others running to more conventional short fiction lengths, all of them united by common themes of family, femininity and motherhood.
Rooted in the Indian diaspora, many of the stories in Ruined a Little When We Are Born are centered on rituals of one kind or another, ranging from the mundane to the arcane. In the opening story, “Mother, False,” a girl experiences shocking physical changes upon the death of her mother. In “Shabnam Salamat,” the arrival of her father’s new young bride sparks an awakening in a daughter. In the bewitching “There Are Places That Will Fill You Up,” a girl connects with her long-lost mother in a search for new meaning, with surprising results. And in “Milky-Eyed Orgasm Swallows Me Whole,” a woman has a conversation with the physical manifestation of her sexual climaxes.
Through beautifully constructed sentences that read as much like prayers as they do like prose, Zambrano’s stories slither and grow like unpredictable, invasive vines, creeping inside your brain and refusing to leave. It doesn’t seem to matter whether she gives herself 10 pages or just one; this is an author who understands that the job of fiction is to generate empathy and genuine emotional response in the reader, and who knows how to extract those things with poise and confidence.
There’s a swagger to this book, a sense of being in gifted hands, and yet there’s also a dramatic vulnerability that comes through, particularly in the stories about growing up, learning what adulthood means or realizing that parents are not superheroes. Whether she’s exploring Indian folklore or introducing an old woman to the strange powers of a dishwasher, Zambrano is always in command, always writing earnestly and vividly. Anyone who enjoys the careful art of the short story will find that in this case, “art” is very much the key word.
