‘These sixteen stories follow a cast of characters destined to navigate a world that is by turns perplexing, intriguing, threatening. What to Put in a Suitcase evokes a rich variety of people and situations: a suburban dinner party whose hosts harbour a troubling secret; a childhood prank in 1940s Dublin with tragic consequences that reverberate through the decades; the sinister challenge of walking along a deserted corridor; a family fleeing environmental disaster in Dublin of the near future; a spirited defence of territory, even if only in the local café. 

Engaged with both the minutiae of thought processes and the impulse to action, these stories grapple with the twists and turns of individual psychology and personal relationships. Wider themes of justice and the place of the individual in the political and social context of the modern world are never far from the surface, at times, when least expected, seasoned with sly humour. An intriguing and compelling collection.’

I was fortunate to receive an advance review copy of What to Put in a Suitcase, the forthcoming volume of short stories by award-winning poet and fiction writer Liz McSkeane.  The slender collection comprises sixteen stories, each wrestling with topics and themes that readers may instinctively want to shy away from, including the climate emergency; the COVID-19 pandemic; war and the experience of refugees; sexual violence; and skewed power dynamics predicated on race, gender, or class. McSkeane, to her credit, seems to revel in discomfort, whether moral, physical, emotional, psychological, or political, compelling her characters and readers alike to scrutinise their own consciences through the lens of the most everyday encounters as well as the most profound existential threats. 

What to Put in a Suitcase is a sharp collection, ebbing and flowing with tides of psychological suspense. I was intrigued by McSkeane’s negotiation of the idea female embodiment, which constitutes one of the volume’s principal thematic concerns. In stories such as ‘Regression Analysis’, ‘Lebensraum’, and ‘The Reprieve’, McSkeane explores the experience of occupying space as a woman, and the distrust of one’s own body, the necessity of risk assessment and evasive measures, and the expectations of cordiality, submission, or kindness entailed by femininity. By turns poignant and corrosive, these stories lay bare the unspoken psychological and emotional conflicts waged by women. ‘Regression Analysis’ documents the tortuous mental acrobatics undertaken by a woman who feels, or imagines, herself being followed in a deserted hospital corridor; McSkeane is pointed in her forensic dissection of her protagonist’s most minor decisions, analysing the suitability of her shoes for flight, the vulnerability of her gait, and the significance of her facial expressions. ‘Underground’ has a similar effect, moving from the crisis mentality of a woman who feels her life to be endangered to one who is humiliated in the most quotidian (and, sadly, common) of ways by being groped anonymously in a crowded train carriage. This experience is conveyed with shuddering familiarity, as McSkeane succeeds in creating an atmosphere of stifling discomfort and disbelief:

‘It’s possible at first to think that this could be just imagination or even that whoever is doing it doesn’t realise. A loud sigh should give the message, a shift of weight from the right foot to the left so that one hip is angled back towards the carriage door and away from the crowd. A small disturbance but even that’s too much. One passenger glares, another rolls eyes skywards. Down here it’s impossible to move, almost impossible to breathe. The air is heavy with body odours: sweat, clothes damp with sweat, bad breath, all mingled with a whiff of perfume. Every scrap of concentration is focused on keeping the nausea down.

At least until the very gentle touch returns, a slight pressure, nothing more than than at first, then a little firmer. There’s a definite movement now. A rhythm. But everyone is touching someone, intimately, chins are practically resting on shoulders, breasts are flattened on arms, buttocks are rubbing thighs, everything is getting scraped and jostled by briefcases and carrier bags and rolled newspapers. It’s awful. Once found, a stance is held, for no movement is possible, none permissible beyond the swinging and jolting caused by the lurching carriage itself.’

‘Lebensraum’, meanwhile, transports readers to the bitterness and recrimination of the most stringent pandemic lockdowns, interrogating the moral superciliousness with which restrictions were policed by a population brought to its knees by boredom, fear, and isolation. In this story, McSkeane whips her protagonist into a froth of fury at the entitlement and inconsideration of those who would encroach on her enjoyment of a simple coffee, tempered by resentment of the apparent expectation that she, a single woman, will yield her precious café table to an elderly woman. This resentment is revisited in stories such as ‘A Hot Coffee’ and ‘Atlanta’, as McSkeane probes the ubiquitous convention that women ought to be compassionate and charitable, the patriarchal assumptions underlying such beliefs, and the minefield created at the intersection of femininity and financial privilege. ‘The Reprieve’ was, to me at least, one of the most poignant stories in the volume, narrating the violent highs and lows of health anxiety, and the paralysis of the everyday that takes place when one is gripped by fear of terminal illness. The story reveals the havoc such anxiety plays with personal relationships and ordinary psychological functions as its protagonist convinces herself she has breast cancer, and experiences only fleeting relief at the reassurances of her doctor. The story looks at health anxiety, a relatively common and little understood mental disorder, through the lens of femininity: women in particular are taught not to trust their own bodies, to anticipate inevitable pain, to fear the potential betrayals of unplanned pregnancy, infertility, or physical violation, and to discipline their appetites according to an unattainable standard of aesthetic perfection. In the context of a culture of female self-disgust and self-policing, the calamity of cancer and its connotations of cellular insurrection is devastating, forcing a total reassessment of priorities and implying that the body has ways of taking its own revenge. The effect is elegantly executed and emotionally incisive, making the story one of the most uncomfortable and accomplished instalments in the volume. 

Contrasting with the deployment of (frequently nameless) female protagonists to interrogate the individual impact of cultural and social conditioning in a patriarchal world order, McSkeane also makes use of the perspective of children to cast adult motivation into sharp relief. In stories such as ‘Ambush’, ‘The Games’, and ‘Lessons’, McSkeane manipulates the innocence of her child protagonists to interrogate processes of moral interpretation and psychological reaction unmediated by the self-consciousness of adulthood. The effect can be by turns comic and poignant, shedding light on the inheritance of sectarian sensibilities, the lasting impact of seemingly insignificant humiliations and failures, and the devastating confluence of social privilege and ecclesiastical tyranny in mid-twentieth century Ireland. Overall, the volume is enjoyable and perceptive, albeit somewhat uneven. The prose could be more taut, as some sentences run over and some stories indulge in slightly overwrought sentiment. However, McSkeane shows clear evidence of a wry sense of humour, as well as a talent for building tension and creating a viscerally familiar sense of atmosphere, and the work of the independent publisher Turas Press is well worth supporting.