A story so good, I'm skipping it: "Just Another Family" by Lori Ostlund (Best American Short Stories 2024)

There are pretty much two reasons why I skip analysis of individual stories in Best American Short Stories each year. Either I dislike the story so much I can't even motivate myself to look at why I don't like it, or I like it so much, I have nothing to add. Lori Ostlund's "Just Another Family" is one of the latter. 

To put it a little more accurately, the reason I'm refraining from looking at it in depth isn't so much that I liked it as that I don't think the story presents any major obstacles to a lay reader that would impede understanding and enjoyment, so I don't have much of a role here. As a novella more than a short story, it's also a little bit difficult to treat it as I normally do. Because of its broader scale, individual words and phrases don't carry quite the same weight as they do in a short story. There's a really humorous section where Sybil, the main character, discusses the characters at the nursing home of the mother of her partner, Rachel. In a short story, all that good material would have had to be excised. Because meaning doesn't have to be hidden or encoded as in a briefer story, I think most of what a normal reader needs is right out in the open. So I can move on, which is good, because as I get near the end every year, I start to lose the gumption to do this. 

I wouldn't want to tackle a collection of 20 best novellas every year, but I don't mind one being snuck in.