Book Review: But I Digretch

Reviewed by Erica Ball

A hilarious and touching take on the joyful absurdities of being emotional creatures

But I Digretch is a collection of charmingly varied short stories all told in the author’s unique, bitingly clever, and humorous voice. They feature people living on the edges and cracks of the world and dive deep into what it’s like to be them and live there. Touching on emotion, addiction, family dysfunction, mental illness, horror, violence, LGBTQIA+ experiences, love, and beauty, they are also packed with observations generalizable to what it’s like being a thinking and feeling person on this planet.

Told in a playful style with astonishing turns of phrase and plenty of allusions and associations, the author’s story is at times like poetry in short story form. Some stories also venture into something closer to play or sketch form. One includes copious notes to relevant academic research. Once in a while, the author even breaks the fourth wall to address the reader in order to provide context for what is about to come. Some of them are continuations of previous ones, others stand alone. 

The stories themselves mostly take the form of first-person narratives, where we are brought into the deep mental and emotional inner worlds of the characters/narrators. There are moments of action but they all also feature beautiful long contemplative soliloquies on a touch or smell and the associations it evokes. But all the stories also feature a writing style that is rich and dense—so much so that it tickles the language center of the brain with the way it plays with language (“Jackfrostbitten” is my favorite new word). Such inventiveness effectively creates lasting vivid sensations for the reader. 

In contrast to the lightheartedness of the use of language, though, many of the stories take sudden violent turns and the reader needs to prepare for dramatic twist endings. There are often moments of extreme gritty darkness and some of them become outright bloody. But, since the narrator is often positioned as a romantic, even a love poet, even the dark parts are presented as a sort of crack in what is otherwise gilded in love and beauty (and, sometimes, the love of beauty).

With the density of wordplay, I would recommend the reader not rush through these, but enjoy them slowly to really let the metaphors register. In less capable hands this density of metaphor may have been too much. As it is, they are delivered with such playfulness and self-awareness that the reading experience feels more like a game than anything else. 

This collection would be loved by fans of offbeat literary fiction, puns and wordplay, magical realism, horror or the macabre, and absurdist literary fiction.

The overall experience is of having spent time in the skin of someone who is immersed in both the experience of being alive and in observations of that experience. Every sense feels heightened and awareness is turned up to 11. They are stories of characters who are living hard, loving hard, and giving their all in everything they do.

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Thank you for reading Erica Ball’s book review of But I Digretch by Gretchen Astro Turner! If you liked what you read, please spend some more time with us at the links below.