Jewelry Box: A Collection of Histories

12.00 Jewelry Box is a collection of intimate histories, concentrated and impressionistic renderings of the life that surrounds us, just under the surface. Grand scale history reveals one reality, but in Sheehan’s book, microcosms are also drenched in the past—in histories. Here stories blossom out from objects and concepts, some of them mundane at first glance: a tube of mascara, a cat’s tail, mushroom paté. Straddling memoir and fiction, the collection’s fifty-eight short works (some as brief as a paragraph, others concentrated in a few pages) explore the nuances of sexuality, motherhood, love, and ambition. As a whole, this book comprises a portrait of a writer reasserting what it means to know a life and tell a story. Excerpt from Jewelry Box“Small Buddha” She is the girl next door. She is soft and sly and brilliant and exuberant and demure. She and I eat oysters together, and drink a little beer. We live on different sides of the railroad tracks. But it is Mardi Gras, and