“Privacy is a Figment of Eden”: Review of Math for the Self Crippling by Ursula Villarreal-Moura
Review by Karin Falcone Krieger
Math for the Self-Crippling by Ursula Villarreal-Moura
Publication Date: May 1, 2022
Publisher: Gold Line Press
ISBN: 978-1-938900-42-6
In the small city that is AWP, in the last hour where a mix of desperation and bliss fills the common room, I watch as the presses begin to wheel and haul away the bungied crates of books not chosen. I am a straggler not wishing for the magic to disappear, drawn to the Gold Line Press table, and their handsome array of hand sized books and chaps.
Math for the Self-Crippling by Ursula Villarreal-Moura begins with the narrator’s retelling of an oft retold family story, of a séance in a neighbor’s backyard, 1953:
“First the envelope floated off the table, then the gingham table cloth spun off in a gust, Finally the table bobbed as if riding a cosmic wave.”
Like the séance, the collection builds on history, memory and mysticism. Ursula Villarreal-Moura creates a whole from small stories, a feat as ineffable as the undulating table. Imagine Eve Babitz, but terse and sober, a blurred autobiography filed under flash fiction. The math is in the accumulation of years in the title of the stories. When the narrator leaves home, the numbers cease, the writing becomes grounded in place over time, a math of experiences that are a kind of useful wounding.
Small stories that begin as a Moth Story Slam surprise with their carefully crafted endings. The narrator in “Sad Girl, 1992” is a California teenager sitting at a bus stop, suddenly face to face with a chola who says “You see my friend over there…” It is one of those moments that makes a person who they are, who they become. Later, she borrows fashion cues from the gangster girls, giant gold earrings and too bright lipstick, someone she wasn't but a nod to her neighborhood, later figuring out who to be at college.
“Fur of My Insecurities” speaks to those long time-bending private thoughts, a Clarice Lispector in miniature. The narrator describes the moment of panic in a strange city when her boyfriend wanders off, “My breathing hopscotched with questions of how long I could stand still.” A doomed honeymoon in Croatia is a battle of the sexes, of the conscious versus the mindless, her insomnia and his deep jetlagged sleep: “On this bed tonight you’re reduced to a bruise of solitude.”
She uses second person here, and freely moves to first and third as it serves each story. The title story begins, “When my day is irrevocably ruined, I drive by my childhood house…” It is a common dreamscape and nightmare for so many of us, an evocative comfort and torture. “…this house never taught me how to let go.”
On the way home from my AWP pilgrimage, I stopped in a neighboring city to visit my oldest friend. As college roommates we were perfect foils: right- and left-brained, left- and right-handed. Now she is a high school math teacher, so I impulsively gifted it to her, an irresistible correspondence, for all the stories women share and don't share, and how we care for them, hone and hold them over time.
Karin Falcone Krieger (she/her) is a writer, visual artist, gardener, advocate, and chef. Her recent reviews, interviews, journalism, poetics, and essays have been published in Tupelo Quarterly, Able News, Contingent Magazine, BlazeVOX, LITPUB, The Laurel Review, The Literary Review, and other publications. She holds a BA in Social Sciences from SUNY Stony Brook, and an MFA from The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University. She taught freshman composition as an adjunct instructor at several New York area colleges from 1999-2019. Her projects can be seen at www.karinfalconekrieger.com.