Stranger than nonfiction

Allison Amend sits in the backyard of her childhood home in Lincoln Park, occupied by a life-size penguin sculpture, a black couch sectioned like a worm and an unusually long row of golf shoes. “My parents are wonderful, eccentric people,” says the author, who now lives in New York. “My mother is so fun, but a little off-the-wall. Everyone intelligent is weird.”

The same could be said for the varied characters in Amend’s debut story collection, Things That Pass for Love. As outwardly normal as they seem, holding down respectable jobs while dealing with the darker side of family—illegitimate children, estranged siblings, enraged wives, Jewish inconsistency—her characters inwardly inhabit complex territory.

Amend’s stories have a Flannery O’Connor–esque undercurrent of the imminently terrible and darkly comic. Walter Simons, in “How Much Greater the Miracle,” cries on the golf course not because his wife wings her driver at him but because in his life, unlike his golf game, he doesn’t get a shot at making things right. In “The World Tastes Good,” the narrator’s mother brings home boarders from the bus station, including a gay porn couple who uncover the unrest lurking in the cornfields for the narrator, and in the heart for her mother. In the lead story, “Dominion Over Every Erring Thing,” a white teacher must confront the punk frustrating her efforts in the inner-city classroom, as bodies fall from descending planes.

Each story is a distinct experience, as if it were an anthology featuring several writers weighing in on the weirdness of relationships and the struggle for connection. Amend’s characters teeter between the traps of loneliness and love.

“I’m interested in love relationships other than romantic love,” Amend explains. “Other kinds of love are so important. Those connections with people you have in life that don’t work out for whatever reason but you’re still very close. ”

In “People You Know Best,” a woman hopefully assumes that the mercurial man frequenting her book clubs is interested in her. When the man confesses his affection for Giorgio, her Labrador, she suffers what Amend calls the “ultimate betrayal”—love-struck Giorgio leaves with him.

So when strange things happen, as they do in Amend stories, there is no predicting how her characters will react. “Find out what they’re afraid of and make it happen to them,” she says, relying on a lesson she picked up while getting her MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

Amend’s stories have appeared in premier lit journals like One Story, Story Quarterly and Prairie Schooner. But despite that success, the New York transplant came back to Chicago to publish her debut collection with OV Books. “She’s a force of nature in terms of publishing,” Amend says of Gina Frangello, publisher of OV Books. She confesses to being unable to hold a conversation about publishing without referring to her editor. “My book would not be half the book without her.”

Amend’s experience likely will take her back to small presses for her novels, which, incongruously, have yet to be published. She’s working on one now about art forgery and cloning. “Success means something different than it did five years ago,” she says. “Five years ago, I would have said success was a good book deal with a major publisher. Now I don’t think that’s a gauge of anything other than a book deal. Kinda like SATs.”

This from a writer who has won awards and published stories for a decade. “My friend calls them crumbs,” she says. “Honorable mentions in a contest, placing a story. If you get enough, they sustain you until the next meal.” With Things That Pass for Love, expect a banquet.

Amend will read Sunday 26 at Sunday Salon Chicago.