Toronto's Women's News Sept. 2002. Vol. 4 No. 8
I’ve had a discussion with several writer friends about whether or not intensive writing studies make for technically over-wrought work. We’ve all read insipid writing that appears to be more methodological than meaningful, more conservatively cautious than creatively interesting. Precisely written, passionless texts.
Yet Nancy Lee, a graduate of the University of British Columbia’s Creative Writing program, manages to imbue visceral life into her skillfully constructed short stories. Lee writes on the nerve, peering courageously into dark moments, perching on the shoulders of characters coping with difficult circumstances and rendering Dead Girls a profoundly emotive short story collection.
Lee shows us varied characters at different ages. Teenagers awkwardly negotiate boundaries of sexuality and control. A young woman struggles to relate to a journalist who photographs human rights violations. A daughter cares for her terminally ill father. An overworked, pill-popping nurse volunteers at a high school dance. A street girl mulls over her insecurities and learns to trust. Two women go on a rampage in a mini van.
Each story pulls the reader into deeply personal spaces while capturing the raw pulse of the city. We linger over characters’ thoughts, decisions and bodies. We consider the nexus points of emotional distance where characters are alone in togetherness. We see reoccurring images in the downtown landscape of skateboarders and alleyways. Most importantly, Lee takes us unflinchingly into the city’s shadows, showing us the dark sinew of violence and a community struggling to cope with mysterious disappearances and serial killings of downtown sex-trade workers.
The two most poignant stories in this collection are the title story "Dead Girls" and "Sisters," both of which mirror news stories we’ve heard from Vancouver’s Lower East Side. Here Lee does what no journalistic purview can do she guides us inside the personal lives, feelings, minds and experiences of otherwise marginalized women and their families. She does so with so much sensitivity, candor and skill I began to forget these characters aren’t real people. The elegiac residue of these stories stayed with me for weeks.
Both technically deft and emotionally haunting, the story "Dead Girls" is also notable for its completely disarming use of the pronoun "you." You, the reader, are no longer spectator, but instead the mother of a lost daughter.
Lee is a courageous writer whose debut short story collection is an important book insofar as its probing narrative around the serial killings gives voice to silenced women. Lee’s stories take us beyond clinical victim statistics in the news and into the urban experience - not just of the lives lost through violence, but also of how human darkness ripples through communities and affects us all as daughters, mothers, sisters, citizens. In doing so, Lee creates a veritable cultural artifact for Vancouver. We watch the news and it gives us pause. We read books like Dead Girls and we begin to understand.
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