A Manual for How to Love Us: Stories

A debut, interlinked collection of stories exploring the primal nature of women’s grief—offering insight into the profound experience of loss and the absurd ways in which we seek control in an unruly world.Seamlessly shifting between the speculative and the blindingly real, balancing the bizarre with the subtle brutality of the mundane, A Manual for How to Love Us is a tender portrait of women trying their best to survive, love, and find genuine meaning in the aftermath of loss.In these unconventional and unpredictably connected stories, Erin Slaughter shatters the stereotype of the soft-spoken, sorrowful woman in distress, queering the domestic and honoring the feral in all of us. In each story, grieving women embrace their wildest impulses as they attempt to master their lives: one woman becomes a “gazer” at a fraternity house, another slowly moves into her otherworldly stained-glass art, a couple speaks only in their basement’s black box, and a thruple must decide what to do when one partner disappears.The women in Erin Slaughter’s stories suffer messy breaks, whisper secrets to the ghosts tangled in the knots of their hair, eat raw meat to commune with their inner wolves, and build deadly MLM schemes along the Gulf Coast.Set across oft-overlooked towns in the American South, A Manual for How to Love Us spotlights women who are living on the brink and clinging to its precipitous edge. Lyrical and surprisingly humorous, A Manual for How to Love Us is an exciting debut that reveals the sticky complications of living in a body, in all its grotesquerie and glory.

“Slaughter admirably conveys a heightened awareness of how we harbor within our tamed lives an undeniable wildness.”

“[A] gritty debut fiction collection…[readers] will appreciate Slaughter’s storytelling chops.”

Julia Fine, author of The Upstairs House and What Should Be Wild

“The stories in A Manual for How to Love Us read like a cold ocean swim: salty and refreshing and sincere, each a bracing exploration of the particular blessings and burdens of womanhood in all its ugliness and glory. I couldn’t ask for something stranger or more beautiful. Erin Slaughter is a masterful sentence writer in firm command of her craft, and this book is an inspiration and a gift.”

Isle McElroy, author of The Atmospherians and People Collide

“Erin Slaughter’s debut collection, A Manual for How to Love Us, is an evocative mix of strange realism and Bachelardian obsession. Slaughter is a gifted stylist who can instill the most mundane objects with profound meaning and depth. In her world, a tongue is never only a tongue, a thorn far more than a thorn, and even a fly–buzzing alone in a bedroom–harbors the impact of a father.”

Booklist"With a poet’s lyricism, Erin Slaughter crafts a debut collection that is speculative, dark, and thoroughly feral."

“Stunningly fierce … Slaughter intentionally blurs the line between real and unreal and ghosts and people, creating a spellbinding tilt across stories and worlds. This dark but whimsical collection is perfect for fans of magical realism and strong female characters."

About the Author

Erin Slaughter is the author of the short story collection A Manual How to Love Us, and two books of poetry: The Sorrow Festival and I Will Tell This Story to the Sun Until You Remember That You Are the Sun. She is editor and co-founder of literary journal and chapbook press The Hunger. Originally from North Texas, she holds an MFA from Western Kentucky University and is a PhD candidate at Florida State University, where she served as Nonfiction Editor of the Southeast Review and was awarded the Edward H. and Marie C. Kingsbury Fellowship. She lives in Tallahassee, Florida.

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