In her debut story collection, Julia Ridley Smith navigates the currents and eddies of desire, sex, love, and relationships.

These twelve highly accomplished stories are witty and accessible, intelligent and thought-provoking. A girls' week at the beach prompts hot tub drinking, awkward confessions, and a poignant reconsideration of friendship. A caregiver extracts a small repayment from her elderly patient for his long-forgotten role in the demise of her family. A young woman, new to New York City, finds herself in a complex but tacky love affair and reckons with the unfolding plot of her life. In the title story, a woman plots to conceive a second child while at a convention hotel with her husband and teenage daughter, both of whom have other plans. Smith’s stories will beguile and delight readers while at the same time exploring the deep and often difficult ties of family, marriage, and romantic love in modern life.

Excerpt

At the Arrowhead

Sharla has been taking money from Mr. Nichols in Room 423. While he’s in the bathroom, she slips a five or ten out of his cracked leather wallet and stuffs it in her pocket. She looks through the window at the geyser in the middle of the green manmade lake and waits for him to call out, Hey girl. The woman who used to have this room called her honey. The one before that, sugar. Mr. Nichols doesn’t want her in the bathroom with him the whole time, like some residents do, but he needs help transferring from toilet to wheelchair, wheelchair to bed. In January, he could still do it by himself. Now it’s July.

“Hey! Hey, girl!”

After cleaning up Mr. Nichols, she gets him back into his wheelchair. She might be closing in on fifty, or maybe it’s closing in on her, but she’s strong. Ten years she’s been doing this job, and before that she did other hard work, on her feet all day, moving and lifting and smiling, in restaurants, stores, a nursery school. She’s always told potential employers that she doesn’t mind working hard because she’s the kind of person who likes to keep busy. It’s what she tells Nurse Jill, who tries to load her up with work beyond what she thinks Sharla can handle. What Nurse Jill doesn’t know is, she is only one of many who have tried to break Sharla.

Parked before the playing television with his soft drink, Mr. Nichols says, as he always does, Thank you. She says, You’re welcome. Good manners are something nobody can take away from you, her grandmother used to say. It doesn’t hurt anybody to be civil. Sharla taught her children the same.

Not all the residents are civil to Sharla. They have groped her. They have called her ugly things because they look at her hair and think she is mixed. Maybe she is—how would she know—but her mother had the same hair, and she was white. Some residents talk to Sharla like she’s stupid, others like she’s a person they knew long ago, a person they loved, or didn’t. A few don’t talk at all. She doesn’t hold any of this against them. They can’t help what they do. They are old, lonely, sick people: confused, many of them, and all of them tired.

Together, Sharla and Mr. Nichols watch history unspooling on the television, the day’s new horrors and absurdities recalling moments from other decades, as far back as the 1940s for Mr. Nichols, for Sharla mostly the seventies and eighties. Everything’s happening again, he says, and she asks if he thinks it’s worse this time, the way people are saying. He’s not sure, but they agree it’s a shame—the world, the way people do today.

In a minute, she’ll leave his room to go help somebody else. She won’t take anything from that resident, nor the next one, nor the next: each of them sitting in their separate rooms—close, but apart, like eggs in a carton. She only takes from Mr. Nichols. What he did was a long time ago, but she can’t forget it.

At home she changes the sheets and cleans the bathroom. Her stepdaughter Crystal is coming from Winston-Salem to stay the weekend. Sharla doesn’t like living alone. When her Donnie left, her last child to go off to college, she woke at 2:00 a.m. every night for weeks, convinced she was having a heart attack. Her children are everything to her. She ended it with her first two husbands because they just could not be decent to the children. If Rusty wasn’t ignoring them, he was scaring them to death, and Al just picked, picked, picked: nobody could do a damn thing right.

Her third husband, Chase, was sweet with the kids, but you couldn’t really count on him for anything but trouble. “Ha, ha, you should’ve known he was a cheater from his name,” said a girl she used to work with, thinking it was okay to make fun because Sharla must be hardened to her marriages breaking up. “You know, because he chases tail,” the girl said, assuming after Sharla didn’t laugh that she didn’t get the joke.

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About the Author

Sex Romp Gone Wrong is Julia Ridley Smith’s first story collection. Her first book, The Sum of Trifles, is a memoir published by the University of Georgia Press (2021) as a title in their Crux literary nonfiction series. Julia’s short stories and essays have appeared in the Alaska Quarterly Review, American Literary Review, Arts and Letters, the Carolina Quarterly, Chelsea, Ecotone, Electric Literature, the Greensboro Review, the New England Review, Southern Cultures, and The Southern Review, among other places. Julia teaches creative writing at UNC Chapel Hill.