‘Love Is Not A Pie’ by Amy Bloom

Love Is Not A Pie by Amy Bloom, 1990

The magic trick:

Telling the story of a family’s years-in-the-making crisis, confronted in one dramatic weekend

Many short stories these days seem to avoid highlighting their characters’ moments of crisis. Instead, they strive to portray the monotony of crisis in the making. We see them making a series of bad, but mundane, decisions. We know these small choices, often based on the avoidance of conflict, will only postpone crisis. But that eventual reckoning is left out of the story, only suggested as some future doom to occur after the final page.

Amy Bloom in “Love Is Not A Pie” does not subscribe to such a method. In fact, she does the exact opposite.

This is the story of a family who, having worked for years to avoid conflict, is forced to face crisis head-on. That reckoning is not implied or foreshadowed. This is the story of that crisis. Almost absurdly so. In one weekend, our protagonist reckons with the death of her mother, reconsiders the nature of her parents’ marriage (was their a three-way affair with a family friend?), and breaks off her engagement.

I’ll leave it to you to decide which kind of story you like better – the conflict avoidance or the reckoning. Me? I’ll take “Love Is Not A Pie” all day, every day.

And that’s quite a trick on Bloom’s part.

The selection:

My sister, my father, and I worked the room. And everyone who came in my father embraced. It didn’t matter whether they started to pat him on the back or shake his hand, he pulled them to him and hugged them so hard I saw people’s feet lift right off the floor. Lizzie and I took the more passive route, letting people do whatever they wanted to us, patting, stroking, embracing, cupping our faces in their hands.

My father was in the middle of squeezing Mrs. Ellis, our cleaning lady, when he saw Mr. DeCuervo come in, still carrying his suitcase. He about dropped Mrs. Ellis and went charging over to Mr. DeCuervo, wrapped his arms around him, and the two of them moaned and rocked together in a passionate, musicless waltz. My sister and I sat down on the couch, pressed against each other, watching our father cry all over his friend, our mother’s lover.

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