Because I Don't Know What You Mean and What You Don't

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It's a book I'll read again - if you know Josie Long as a comedian, don't go into this one expecting laughs. The narrators of these stories are mostly women trying to find out things about themselves and their place in the world, within their close relationships especially. This being her first book of stories, and her best being known mainly for her award-winning comedy and activism, Long can be forgiven.

With everything from teenage friendship to parenthood to leaving London, this debut collection is perfect for fans of Miranda July, Emma Jane Unsworth and Dolly Alderton. Since then, she’s made nine hit solo comedy shows, shaking off the adorkably quirky image of her early days with more earnest shows exploring heartbreak and family ( Cara Josephine, 2014), her fury at Brexit ( Something Better, 2016), and the pains of new parenthood ( Tender, 2019). I found the stories here daring, funny, refreshingly frank, miraculous and, despite all the misshapen characters, refreshingly uplifting.

I found this short story collection (of sixteen) to be just alright and wouldn’t really recommend it on the whole. Even if they’re recorded, “they’re just gone, they go… [Whereas] I do feel excited about the prospect that maybe in ten years people might read [these] and be talking about them,” she says. There are also times you want Long to imbue important moments with more detail, and slow the pace, so the reader can really feel what's being portrayed. You can read this either one story at a time or all at once, and many of these short stories left me wanting more and I would love to read a full-length version of some of these plots. She won the Best Newcomer award at Edinburgh Fringe Festival and has been nominated three times for Best Show.

As is always the case with a collection of stories, I connected more with some than others but I truly enjoyed reading them all - which is quite rare for me. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. Everyone has experienced loss, unrequited love, a bully, and more importantly their own internal doubt - perhaps not in excess as the poor characters involved in Long's short stories. One mixed blessing is the strong influence of Raymond Carver, most clearly in the deliberately unwieldy title of the collection and the echo of 'A Small Good Thing' in Long's 'A Little Dirty Thing'.These are the stories where Long fully explores the characters' world and teases its complexities out, giving the protagonist and the reader moments of epiphany. It’s been amazing to draw on my life, use the pain of it, the joy of it… A few of the stories are about people who aren’t quite able to understand what it is they’re doing and why until it’s too late. This may result in small marks to the dustjacket and title page, please also bear in mind that each signature will be a little different from the one we show here. I got to the end the first story thinking what have I missed and what was that all about and this continued through the book.

From her new home in Glasgow, the much-loved standup insists there’s much more to life than sweating on the Central line and doing hand-to-hand combat with the city’s cost-of-living crisis. It was very provocative and unnerving at times how the one's presentation is manipulation or a defense mechanism and how one's thoughts do not equal what they expose to the world.By the age of 24 her first full-length Edinburgh Fringe show had won her a Best Newcomer Award and the 41-year-old has been a staple of the capital’s Festival scene ever since with this year’s Re-Enchantment continuing its UK tour with gigs in Aberdeen and Inverness later this month.

On the other end, cold and brazen was by far my least favourite which follows a middle aged dad who wants to get in with the younger generation but is a creep and just ugh I didn’t care for him nor the story in the slightest. If I did have one criticism it would be that I often struggled to differentiate the character voices from Josie's own voice, but given that I love her that really wasn't too much of a struggle for me.Josie Long’s first collection reveals a natural gift with a frank and poignant tale; teenage experience, community WhatsApp groups and broken family units are picked apart with a wry cynicism at the weirdness and cruelty of life. She broke out at the age of 17, winning the 1999 BBC New Comedy Award with a surreal tall tale about a bloodbath over chicken giblets in Bromley’s Waitrose. I’d had my kids and that was so much a part of my life and I care so much about politics I thought it had to be things that I talk about.