Adrienne Gunn
is the author of fiction, essays, and screenplays. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in McSweeney’s, TriQuarterly, PANK, and NewCity. She has a Master of Arts in Creative Writing degree from Northwestern University and is currently completing her thesis in the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing program at the University of Oregon, where she also serves as an undergraduate instructor of fiction, composition, and humanities. She is from Chicago, Illinois and currently lives in Eugene, Oregon with her son, Max.
“He doesn’t like it when she talks about Chicago. America. It makes her seem stupid, flighty. When she characterizes this place, her narrow lens of privilege betrays her, cheapens her, and he is almost disgusted by her. He dismisses the thought and focuses on the hills of her chest. The hair that turns in soft curves around her shoulders. No, he is not angry with her. Can she be expected to recognize things she has never known? She tries.”
- When He’s LIke This, She Loves Him
Short Story Collection
Adrienne Gunn’s stories make us look at the way we live now, the distractions we seek, and the realities we try so hard to deny. Set against a middle-class, media and consumer-driven American background, her characters ask us, Why do we want the things we want? And why are we so unsatisfied once we have them?
Mallory, driven to the edge by exhaustion and the shock of first time motherhood, considers the unthinkable during a simple summer walk. After his death, Frank reflects on the missed opportunity to connect with his daughter over Princess Diana’s wedding. Troy, a disappointed artist turned housepainter, unexpectedly reconnects with his high school crush and dares to believe he could be something more. And Pippa, the starlet, learns exactly what it takes to make it in Hollywood.
Screenplay
After the shocking breakup of her marriage, a neurotic orthodontist travels with her eight-year-old son to her mother’s lesbian retirement community in Florida where in a series of hilarious misadventures she reconnects with her mother and son, and finds love again. Click here for a full synopsis.
Novel
When He’s Like This, She Loves Him follows Jennifer and Aaron, an affluent Chicago couple trapped in the life they’ve built around themselves. From the outside, their marriage is all that it should be – a nice condo, expensive restaurants, interesting friends – far enough from their parents’ mundane suburbia that it should make them feel sufficiently superior. Yet the discontent remains, forcing each of them to question its origins, their past decisions and mistakes, and how willing they are to be trapped in this future.
Read Online
“While she was usually too exhausted from the daily work and repetitions of motherhood to feel much at all, occasionally during these quiet moments together she felt a love for him so great that she was sure she would die instantly if he were ever hurt.
Yet other times she would stare at him and feel absolutely nothing, as if he were a changeling – someone else’s child that she had agreed to watch today, and possibly again tomorrow.”
- The Sun Was Shining
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