Contemporary Fiction Views: Women seeking to be their best true selves

A woman whose retired father keeps calling her and whose marriage ended some time ago, although the divorce hasn't happened, is distracted from trying to build an artwork involving rare plants in a huge terrarium by the two men in her life.

"Workhorse" is the opening story in Megan Mayhew Bergman's latest story collection, How Strange a Season. Like the women in the other stories, the florist is trying to navigate the consequences of personal choices when it comes to relationships and deal with the natural world.

The florist, who narrates the story, operates a high-concept floral art installation business that barely functions. She may have had artistic dreams once, but there not only is not much demand for her ideas. There's also little sense she ever was excited about those ideas.

Before shutting down the business for good, she decides to make a terrarium installation big enough for models and exotic plants. It's an ongoing project that doesn't spring up overnight, and she spends more time talking to her retired father, who has moved back to Sardinia, and her estranged husband, who comes over to hang out.

Her father keeps saying he wants her to come visit him, but she enjoys being by herself. When they do spend time together, the handover in who is the responsible adult comes without warning.

She functions as a metaphorical beast of burden in both relationships, having to do a lot of heavy lifting. She didn't realize that's what was going on in her marriage until a conversation with a therapist who asked her if she didn't know that her husband was starving. "Aren't we all?" she asks. The therapist wants to know how empathetic her parents were.

Which shows the lens through which one views anything, including a relationship, is skewed with what one brings to the microscope.

It also shows the strength of Bergman's writing. She doesn't have to create female protagonists who are pure heroines. They have their flaws. And their strengths. And their quirks. And any of them who become their own true selves demonstrate anyone can live their best, true life, sometimes when least expected and in ways they didn't imagine when the reader first meets them.

The strength of short stories shines in How Strange a Season. To get to know the essence of a character, and her situation, in a few pages is like enjoying a concerto. It doesn't always have to be a full-blown symphony to convey an essential truth about what it means to try to be oneself in this world.

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