Stunning stories explore families’ untreated mental illnesses

There’s Always More to Say is a beautiful debut collection of stories from English-born Montreal author Natalie Southworth.

The nine stories within are filled with ache and grace, often naming (without shaming) the toll that untreated and/or undiagnosed mental illness takes on families, and the fractured realities that youth in these upbringings are left to navigate on their own.

Already this summary is no match for the elegance of the collection, which blends a delicacy and clarity with dignity in its portrayals of nuanced shifts in sanity.

The DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) is mentioned once, but otherwise Southworth’s characters — children, siblings, mothers, fathers, friends, puppeteers, realtors, politicians, live-in nannies — use the language at their disposal to name the dissonance of mental instability, including “strange,” “spiral,” “fluorescent-lit,” “that kind of brain” and “ambiguously alive.”

For one family, “fog” is the code word to cue the necessity to hospitalize a loved one.

The first line of each story more than delivers. Spectacular opens with a bang: “Fiona Kimble was the first in our class to become anorexic;” while Period of Transition similarly dives right in: “After her youngest child turned six, Pauline decided to go off her meds.”

The first, middle and final stories are connected, producing a structural symmetry that acts as a grounding yet fragile embrace. They follow sisters Cora and Rachel and their strained relationship forever shaped by a mother whose “life was like shards of data, without a pattern.”

If there are epiphanies, they are tempered by time, beginning as a slow or sharp dawning in youth, then reconsidered in adulthood with a perspective often accompanied by the wisdom of midlife.

“Some things could not be spoken of head on, then or later,” says the 15-year old narrator of The Realtor, whose father yearns to adapt to a semblance of normalcy for the sake of his family.

In this assured debut, Southworth’s affecting stories give shape to the inarticulable.

Sara Harms is a Winnipeg editor.