Review of Cold Toast by Kathryn Aldridge- Morris by Sarah Freligh

Is there a difference between a collection of pieces and a book? As a fiction writer and a poet, I want to think so—and so, apparently, did Robert Frost when he posited that if there are twenty-four poems, the twenty-fifth poem needs to be the book, that is, an intentional curation of the poems by the author that dictates a specific experience for the reader. 

What’s true for poets is true for writers of very short fiction looking to assemble their work under one cover and call it a book. In Cold Toast, Kathryn Aldridge-Morris opts for a chronological arrangement, starting in the 1970s and moving forward to the 1990s, a really wise strategy that pays a multitude of dividends for the reader. The movement through time creates a natural narrative arc for the book that emphasizes the rising chorus of voices and front and centers the growing weariness and disillusionment of the female characters who, by book’s end, refuse to be silent any longer.  

I admit to being partial to the first-person stories whose narrators absolutely blaze from the page, fully-formed. Mostly, they remain nameless, which creates an interesting kind of narrative fluidity for the reader: We can read these as one-offs, standalone stories narrated by multitudes, or we can read these as interconnected stories, a novel in flash, from the point of view of a few characters. 

I was especially (and jealously) drawn to the titular story “Cold Toast,” which employs a first-person plural point of view to brilliantly capture the quiet desperation of a group of young mothers as they plod through day after tedious day:

We buy brown curtains and burnt-orange sofas and make homes for husbands who don’t come home at night. We make toast and marmalade and set the table and we get the kids ready for school. We put Clubs and Kit Kats and Wagon Wheels and white bread sandwiches in Tupperware lunchboxes. We have cream rotary telephones and pop-up telephone directories with our girlfriends’ names (7).

The accrual of actions, of duty, and the anaphoric “We” kicking off each of those early sentences fall heavy as an anvil, emphasizing so exactly the plodding routines they’ve harnessed themselves to, for better or worse. It’s the third story in the book, and it’s one that beautifully sets the table for what follows as well as captures the pervasive themes of the book—which, to my mind, checks all the boxes for an effective title story.

Particularly impressive is Aldridge-Morris’s use of setting details not only to evoke an era—those “brown curtains and burnt-orange sofas,” oh my!—but also to add emotional weight and heft to these very short stories: A rotary phone, a ring pull that stands in as a makeshift wedding ring, a rolling pin under a pillow are but a few objects that convey a significance beyond their literal meaning as artifacts.  

Despite the era-specific details, there’s a timelessness to these stories of women and girls who are navigating the treacherous terrain of relationships, themes that are as urgent today as they were thirty-fifty years ago. Which may be the point of it all, highlighting that ever-running treadmill that women negotiate. The year may change, the hairstyles and living rooms updated in accordance with what’s fashionable, but a woman’s seat at the big table remains in flux, an endless shuffling of musical chairs.  In Cold Toast, they stand defiant, refusing to disappear. 

***Cold Toast recently got selected as Book of the Month by the Republic of Consciousness Prize, in collaboration with Queen Mary London, University. To order your own copy, which does ship to USA and Canada: https://www.dahliapublishing.co.uk/product/cold-toast.