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Reviewed by Christian Sia for Readers' Favorite
Chris Wind’s This Is What Happens is a rare gem. A fifty-five-year-old woman feels stuck, wasted, and wounded. All she wants is to return to a cabin on a lakeside one final September to go through journals written for thirty-five years and unravel the mystery of her erasure. She was the best student with high grades, a poet, a composer, an athlete, and a philosopher. How did she, with all those qualities, become an invisible working-class woman who scrubs the floors, earning a minimum wage and barely surviving in a room above a hairdresser’s shop? She has no family ties, no friends, and no results to show for decades of hard work. Her retrospective narrative unearths truths about institutionalized sexism in the arts and academia, lack of mentorship, and patriarchal family dynamics that were never meant to help women succeed.
Chris Wind’s style is unique, blending lyrical storytelling with poetry, using sentences cut in the middle, and thoughts trailing off before they are fully formed to capture the psyche of the heroine. The streams of consciousness become the undercurrent that drives the internal conflict, and the thoughts of the heroine reveal a life that hangs between the tragic and the ridiculous. Some passages kept me thinking about the many ways women are sidelined in the working world. “But women can’t be friends with men. And it’s mostly men who are inside.” The scene where she asked her supervisor out for lunch is one telling example. The supervisor turns down her invitation only to start having lunch with a newly hired guy. This Is What Happens delivers razor-sharp prose, thanks to the witticism in the story, a dark humor that exposes the absurdity of gender-motivated expectations. You will encounter an original, difficult, and wholly original character whose voice demonstrates heartbreaking clarity and philosophical rage.
