The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing
(a selection from Emily's Familiar and Not-So-Familiar Quotations)
“The writing is clean. I really wouldn’t have changed a word. Most of it is true, too, except that the hero quits drinking and the girl grows up. On the last page, the couple gets married, which is a nice way for a love story to end.”
-Melissa Bank, The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing (1999)
This was the very first book I bought from Amazon. It remains one of my favorites, along with Bank’s only other book, The Wonder Spot (2005). As a rule, I don’t care for short stories, but each of these books are made up of connected short stories that cohere into incandescent novels.
Every six months or so I would check to see if she had another book coming out. In August 2022 I read her obituary. She had just died from lung cancer at age 61. It hit me hard - her work spoke to me so deeply, just as it did many young women in my age bracket. Melissa Bank and Helen Fielding had their fingers on the pulses of so many of us then.
A 25th-anniversary edition of The Girls Guide to Hunting and Fishing, with a forward by Nick Hornby, will be published on June 4th.