PEOPLE RUIN EVERYTHING

As a child, I wanted become a writer. I had no idea what I would write about, but the idea of putting part of me onto a page that would last forever was heady. I got older and read like mad. Lots of novels, a few story collections, almost no poetry or non-fiction. When I became serious about trying my hand, it was first one, then another, then many more stories I wrote, never a novel, not until I was in my fifties.

I have wondered many times why short fiction captured me. From the outset, my efforts were serious but not good. Nine years later, I had my first story accepted for publication. Sixteen years after that, my first story collection was published. At that point, I was fifty-three years old.

People Ruin Everything, coming in October from Unsolicited Press, is my fifth story collection. It joins a body of work that includes ten novels and six volumes of poetry. Throughout all these books run themes of grief, betrayal, secrets, and the uncanny damage caused by intimacy. Familiar aspects of marriage, parenthood, and friendship draw you in, then some small disaster makes you want to run. Just like life.

There are nineteen stories. Some are quite short, others much longer. The past looms over the present with an insistent tidal pull. What can’t be escaped, in other words, just avoided, suppressed, cleverly denied.

If I had to choose a favorite story, it would be “Amour Fou.” Without giving away anything critical, a woman who’d been madly in love with a man years before and suffers a crushing loss when he leaves her, meets his adult daughter in the present day. What our narrator assumed gets turned on its head when the daughter fills in crucial details about why her father broke off the relationship and left town. Rather than feel relief, she finds herself wondering at what she used to feel, the depth of it, the madness. All she remembers is the pain, and little of the man himself.

Another is “Liquid Light.” Again, this involves a relationship, in this case a marriage, that on the surface looks successful but is struggling to stay afloat. Into this mess comes another revelation, a shared secret, which makes our protagonist—the wife—wonder if she can go forward as she has been. Suddenly she sees how hard she’s been trying and now has to confront things in herself she wishes would stay in the shadows.

Things that won’t stay hidden lie at the center of the last story I’ll describe, “Pilgrimage.” Here, a sixty-something woman goes back to her hometown to visit her friends from junior high school with whom she has stayed in touch over the years. One suffers health problems, and there is a concern she might not be able to continue living alone. As Nina, our protagonist and traveler, sits with her two friends, past memories are lightly shared. One is deeply disturbing for reasons the friends don’t know, and Nina keeps this, and much else, to herself.

I was raised on secrets and lies. My mother was a serial adulteress (her own words) and claimed that my father’s disaffection has been caused by falling in love with a younger woman. I believed that story, more or less, until my mother was dying and made her startling confession. What felt wrong all my life made sense at last. My father was no saint, but he was an affectionate person who cared deeply for my mother. I could never entirely believe that he simply had gotten bored in his marriage. My mother was entitled to her privacy, she didn’t owe me the revelation she shared, but she made me believe my father was guilty of something he wasn’t. It bothers me still.

Such is the origin of so much of my fiction! And, given that I’ve been married almost fifty years, marriages are often featured, as are difficult mother/daughter relationships. My work is built on anger, betrayal, and buckets of pain, but also on beauty, whimsy, and the value of a good laugh. I invite you to take a look and see for yourself.

Thank you for reading. Find me at www.anneleighparrish.com and my photography at www.laviniastudios.com.

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Anne Leigh Parrish’s new poetry collection, The Banished and the Dead, appeared in March 2026 from Unsolicited Press. Her next collection of short stories, People Ruin Everything, will arrive in October 2026, also from Unsolicited Press. In 2027 she will present two more titles: When the River Runs Blue, poems; and The Quiet Violence of An Angry Heart, both from Unsolicited Press. She lives in Olympia, Washington.

PEOPLE RUIN EVERYTHING

The nineteen stories in Anne Leigh Parrish’s People Ruin Everything blend magical realism with love lost and misbegotten. Ornamental statuary takes on a life of its own; a woman learns years later why the man she adored abandoned her; and a devoted daughter-in-law hears a shocking truth about her husband’s father.

Throughout run the themes of broken marriages and those on the brink; missed chances, irreconcilable differences, and secrets hiding in plain sight. These are stories that lay bare passion and despair in souls searching for redemption, acceptance, and a moment’s kindness.

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Tags: featured, women writers

Category: On Writing