Sundress Reads: Review of It’s No Fun Anymore

Brittany Micka-Foos’s debut short story collection, It’s No Fun Anymore (Apprentice House Press, 2025), is a necessary culmination of raw characters and stories that stare directly into the face of womanhood and the weight of quiet tragedies we’re forced to carry along the way. Across eight stories spanning just over one hundred pages, Micka-Foos effortlessly captures the anger, loss, yearning, and envy that so often accompany adulthood in an unforgiving society.

Have you ever heard someone admit an unpopular feeling you thought only you experienced? Reading this collection felt full of those moments, like the feeling of no longer recognizing yourself in the mirror and wondering when that shift happened. Micka-Foos’s intimate honesty illustrates moments that are painful to read but resonate so deeply

This feeling is illustrated so beautifully in the title story “It’s No Fun Anymore,” which follows a new mother attending a comic convention with her husband and newborn baby for the first time since giving birth. She recounts how different, how powerful, she felt the last time she attended:

“I remember the soccer mom with the severe bob from my last time here, and how quickly she’d covered her son’s eyes when I stepped into the elevator as Red Sonja. The feeling of her gaze boring into me, that silent accusation, the hot molten core of her stare. I fixed my gaze straight ahead at the elevator doors, smiling at myself all the way down. What else could I do?” (Micka-Foos 34)

Reclaiming a sense of womanhood and individuality after they’ve been swallowed by motherhood is one of many complex themes in this collection. Micka-Foos crafts a commentary on how society views motherhood, and women more broadly, as a thankless job. Similarly, in “Border Crossings,” if you are “just” a mother, you’re not doing enough, but conversely, if you are a mother, the naïve and innocent beauty of the girl you once were has been forever tainted. Now you have saggy skin, or you can be neurotic and paranoid; you lose your confidence and innate sexiness.

This theme weaves directly into others: feeling lost, invisible, or vindictive in a marriage; recognizing the complicated resentment toward younger women, the one catching a married man’s eye in a coffee shop or wearing an outfit that proudly accentuates the tight skin of her stomach, the way yours once did. There’s also the yearning to go back to the way things were, or maybe that the truth, the reality you now live, became evident much sooner. Would you do things the same way? Would you cherish one last glance in the mirror before leaving for the night?

Other stories take these interwoven ideas of beauty and womanhood one step further, exploring how the physical body, and threats to this sanctuary through reproductive health or outside harm, can completely morph our sense of self. In “From the Waist Down,” the story opens: “We’re in the hospital again, me and my wayward womb,” (Micka-Foos 39). As the main character waits to go into surgery, forcing a smile for her four-year-old daughter, she recalls the day she left the hospital after giving birth: “I knew then, my body didn’t belong to me anymore. Something had been taken from me” (Micka-Foos 45).

Being a woman, Micka-Foos reminds us, means living with an innate fear every day. A fear of being harmed, of being sexualized, of not being sexualized when we want to be, of taking on the burden of aging parents and infantile babies, of forcing smiles in hospital waiting rooms while we prepare to have our uteruses mutilated or removed or examined by gloved hands and cold metal. We’re forced to feel like we must reinvent ourselves, make ourselves a new, more appealing version that can appeal to the masses, so others remember how they used to look at us, and how we even used to look at ourselves. We could spend forever trying to resurrect versions of ourselves that no longer exist, trying to remember the taut muscles in our thighs before they grew ornery and prickled with cellulite.

Micka-Foos has a natural ability to transform the most personal details into a universal work of art. And while reading this collection was like holding a cracked mirror up to all my most vulnerable imperfections, I never wanted it to end. With each of the eight stories, I felt like I could follow each character on an insurmountable journey for another 300 pages. I understood their motivations, their hunger and desires, their fears and loneliness, all within the confines of the ten pages they have to tell us their story. If you struggle with wanting to be remembered for the greatness you once held, the greatness you once felt, this is the collection for you.

It’s No Fun Anymore was published by Apprentice House Press and is available at Bookshop.org.

---

Elizabeth “Lizzy” DiGrande is a graduate student in Emerson College’s Publishing and Writing program, where she also serves as a Transformational Leaders Fellow and Writing Assistant for the Emerson Grad Life Blog. She is on the board of Boston’s Women’s National Book Association and is passionate about amplifying women’s voices in publishing. Originally from New Jersey, she now resides in Boston and can often be found perusing the city’s public libraries or exploring new restaurants. She hopes to build a career as both a food writer and literary agent championing female-identifying authors.