Small Girl (Small Harbor Publishing, 2024), a collection of micro-memoirs by Lisa Fay Coutley, stands tall among modern-day literature. Through fifteen beautifully crafted works of flash, Coutley details her childhood from the perspective of her younger self, serving as a tour guide to her own past. Grappling with substance abuse, sexual assault, domestic violence, queer identity, and more, this small girl is forced to quickly understand the harsh realities of life; yet through it, all she harbors forgiveness and love—especially for herself.
Within the very first micro-memoir, Coutley masterfully lays out the groundwork for the entirety of the collection. “Honeycomb” opens with Coutley’s father giving her a Cabbage Patch Doll that “came all the way from England,” a simple yet endearing image of supposed love as her father says she is “worth crossing an ocean for” (1). By the end of the paragraph, however, it’s clear that abuse is also a part of Coutley’s childhood, complicating gifts like the doll. Coutley artfully demonstrates this thematic arc without an explicit statement, creating a compass for the entirety of Small Girl. For example, when Coutley hits the doll, it’s assumed to be a learned habit—but from who? Without any direct correlation, readers come to understand that it is likely her father who is the abuser. By providing her with dolls—and fixing them when they’re broken—he allows the cycle of abuse to perpetually continue. Throughout the rest of the collection, she grapples with conflicting emotions surrounding their relationship—emotions that never seem to fully resolve.
As a writer myself, I am particularly inspired by the aforementioned narrative voice Coutley employs in her micro-memoirs. She truly takes on the perspective of a child, one that notices but does not fully understand. Such depictions allow readers to understand, even when the narrator herself doesn’t. For example, after getting in trouble for making out with Jenny—another girl—child Coutley cannot conceptualize the societal stigmas surrounding her actions as she is too young: “I say I won’t [kiss another girl], but it didn’t feel wrong to me” (13). This sentence, as well as others throughout the collection, demonstrate Coutley’s sheer innocence in full, all while providing useful context to understand her surroundings. Writing from this perspective is a challenge, especially when it involves past traumatic experiences—yet Coutley undoubtedly succeeds, crafting a realistic and engaging character that one can’t help but feel sympathetic towards. Intriguingly, the writer occasionally interjects with details only adult Coutley would know, such as: “I can see her face now as if she hasn’t been dead for 15 years and our house Grandma and Grandpa built wasn’t torn down five summers ago” (32). Here, she is referring to her mother and her childhood home, the one in which much of the abuse occurred. By incorporating such vulnerable and candid breaks in the narrative flow, Coutley amplifies the emotional intensity of the collectionas a whole.
There is no specific timeline within Small Girl—at least, not until the very end of the story, when Coutley attaches a specific age to many of the life-altering circumstances she endured. By purely sitting with the fifteen micro-memoirs, however, readers are left to identify time by gathering context clues. At first, I thought the collection was chronological—it made narrative sense, up until around halfway through the memoirs. Then, just after the speaker replaced “Mommy” and “Daddy” with the matured tone of “Mom” and “Dad,” the narrative voice returned to its previously youthful warble, paralleling that of “Honeycomb.” Initially, this abrupt shift surprised me; and soon I came to admire it. I grounded myself in the intentionality of this uncertainty, my attention no longer focusing on the intricacies of time but guided toward the specific occurrences within each memoir. By creating a lack of time-awareness within the memoirs themselves, Coutley drove her creative energy into the full development of each experience, an act that paid off. It does not matter when, exactly, each of these memoirs occurred; it is the fact that they make up Coutley’s childhood, her history, and her life as a collective.
Small Girl is the testimony of both a witness and a survivor, a tiny but mighty child forced to grow up faster than one should. Lisa Fay Coutley should be deeply proud to have crafted such a touching group of memoirs—and readers are deeply lucky to experience them. In Small Girl, there is abuse, and there is hate, yes; but there is also an abundance of love, the kind found only when we reach out to ourselves and listen.
Small Girl is available from Small Harbor Publishing
Mia Grace Davis (she/her) is an undergraduate student at Stanford University. Her work appears in Gone Lawn, The Tusculum Review, and Ice Lolly Review, among others. She is a 2023 National YoungArts Finalist in Writing and a U.S. Presidential Scholars in the Arts Semifinalist. Visit her at miagracedavis.com.
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