Where Do They All Come From?

Many of Friedmann’s stories contain an admixture of quirkiness, with elements of dark humor. Most of the stories contain startling surprise endings that this reviewer hesitates to explain, lest the surprise be ruined. These stories are truly enjoyable-New Orleans Review of BooksOver the course of her novel-writing career, New Orleans writer Patty Friedmann also has written short stories that resonate with her darkly comic voice. This collection offers the best-some old, some new, some before Katrina, a few written after she unscrambled her mind from not evacuating for the storm.

What the reader finds here are the New Orleans characters only locals recognize. Patty doesn’t venture much into the French Quarter; she doesn’t do public drunkenness; she certainly never secondlines. Instead she shares what might be her most memorable character, Jerusha Bailey, a mean old white woman who loses her husband’s ashes in a McDonald’s parking lot. And Darby, the smart girl who lives in a New Orleans gingerbread house but is tormented by her dumb brick-house-dwelling private school classmates-with tragic consequences.

Patty takes us back to the time when Mr. Bingle was hoisted every Christmas onto the front of Maison Blanche on Canal Street in New Orleans. But she also brings young cynics into the flooded city after the storm. We meet lonely men and controlling women, yet we smile crookedly.

Patty Friedmann’s bio says she has lived all her life in New Orleans except for education and natural disasters, and it shows. Walker Percy once said, I make bold to predict that the next Southern literary revival will be led by a Jewish mother, and he went on to describe her as a shrewd self-possessed woman with a sharp eye. It has been said that this is Patty Friedmann. The reader can see it here.