Beautifully Strange Stories: A Review of The Great Grown-Up Game of Make-Believe

The Great Grown-Up Game of Make-Believe

by Lauren D. Woods

Autumn House Press, 2025; 176 pp; $18.95

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The 28 stories in The Great Grown-Up Game of Make-Believe are beyond imaginative in their use of extended metaphors, personification of objects and animals, and storylines that are a mash-up of the real, the surreal, and the downright strange. They also vary in length and form, from microstories complete at one paragraph, through flash-length, to traditional short stories of 10 or more pages. One hermit crab story is told via a questionnaire; another uses definitions. What is consistent is the author’s unique voice and her knack for approaching each story from a distinct and surprising perspective. There are stories written from the points of view of children, teens, a young father, a shape-shifting wife, wedding rings, and a woman from inside her lover’s heart (literally, not figuratively). The variety is impressive, engaging, and provocative. I found myself compelled to read story after story, in part to discover what story-telling twist the author had in store for me next. 

Lauren D. Woods’s debut collection won the 2024 Autumn House Fiction Prize. It’s a worthy addition to this prestigious, long-running award series.

Though the stories aren’t linked, there are connections with key themes that reappear in different guises. One thread that weaves through multiple stories involves the ways in which women assume different roles in life, not always by choice, and how assuming these roles and adapting to them can affect and alter who they are, who they once believed themselves to be. Motherhood and marriage are primary among the life-altering roles depicted in the stories.

“Domestication” is narrated by a 12-year-old girl. She and her friend, a boy, play at husband and wife in an empty, newly built house at the edge of the forest. At the cusp of childhood and adolescence, she knows she will soon be too old for make-believe, too old to roam the forest. She speculates, “Sometimes I watch my mother under the fluorescent kitchen lights and wonder whether she too remembers exploring the wilderness outside her home, climbing trees with her sisters, or the time they came upon an injured hawk.” There is a sadness, an awareness of impending loss in her recognition that, like her mother, she will eventually be domesticated, married with children—just as the forest she now explores will be cut down for more houses, more families like hers.  

Several stories in the collection revolve around women’s loss of self, of identity. In “Proportions,” a wife and mother literally shrinks as she fulfills familial duties. No one notices, not even when she’s so small her husband must stoop clear to the ground to kiss the top of her head. When the family leaves and she’s alone, she watches her choice of TV shows and enjoys a glass of wine and a book she never has time to finish. In the process, she slowly returns to normal size. She then discovers that her dead mother, shrunk to the size of a doll, is there with her, as are her grandmother and the long line of mothers before her, all of them too small to see. Generation upon generation of women—wives and mothers—shrunken, no longer visible to the eye.

In “Dinnertime,” a woman has stopped working to care for one child, then another, while her husband works. Reading to her kids, she realizes she can read, respond to their questions, and engage in entire conversations without thinking at all. She began writing a story collection, and would steal away to work on it. She wonders, “Why did you call it stealing away, even in your own mind? But that was how it felt, sneaking away for an hour, stealing time and pieces of yourself that didn’t belong to you any longer.” She reflects, “If you kept a little more for yourself, everyone might be a little hungrier, but wouldn’t they make out all right? How would it feel to see your life played out whole, instead of torn into pieces, wondering which pieces, if any, still belonged to you. Sometimes you ache for the memory of what it was like to apply your whole mind and body to something, anything.”

This one hit close to home on several fronts. Though my children are now grown, I was a single working mom of one, then two, kids. A mom who dreamed of writing a novel. When I was home with the kids, I often operated on automatic pilot, much like the narrator in “Dinnertime.” Cooking and serving dinner, reading the same books over and over, bath time and the rest, while what I considered my real mind, my real thoughts and dreams—premises and scenes for novels, accepting awards for the movie script based on my novel—spooled concurrently.

Several pieces feature single mothers. Their lives are distinct from one another’s, and from my own, yet these stories mine a poignant vein of truth. In “Dreams of a Sleek, Gray Sofa with Tufted Cushions,” Jane, a single mom with young sons, moves in with a man she’s met at work. An ugly couch becomes symbolic of the compromises she makes to be in this relationship: “June had told him once she liked the couch, and it was too late to take back. There was something about the first lie that made it easier to spin another and another. Like how happy she was here. How she didn’t have any plans to leave.”

When my four-year-old son and I moved in with the man who would become my second husband, the décor struck a discordant note: a collection of bongs in the living room, a locked gun cabinet in the family room, and shopping mall artwork. In those first months, I asked for one change: that he take down the massive, black velvet nude from Tijuana. It was moved to the basement. Still, that painting, its existence, became symbolic of so many compromises, so many choices I would regret. The black velvet nude was my ugly sofa.

An impressive 20 of the stories in the collection were previously published in literary journals. A version of “The Long Brew” first appeared in Literary Mama. A day in the life of a new mother is told in paragraphs that mark the hours from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. In the 10 a.m. entry, she’s exhausted from feedings and lack of sleep: “The baby eats and poops while you wait to fall in love with her.” At noon, her mother calls and tells her daughter that “babies have a way of pocketing time, maybe in the folds of their tiny skin, or their clothes. Who can say? When your mother swears that only this morning you were a newborn, you roll your eyes.” In the final 8 p.m. note, time warps: “And the baby you picked up this morning? That bleating being with crust in her eyes and milk at the corners of her mouth? She’s reaching for the door. Before you finish the cup, she’ll be gone.” Twelve hours of exhaustion and monotony, and of cups of coffee there’s never time to drink, become an endless stream of days. Too slow, then, in a wink, far too fast.

What mother hasn’t experienced some version of that out-of-time sensation? The toddler, a teenager, then an adult. That struggling single mother you once knew, a grandmother.

In the title story, “In The Great Grown-Up Game of Make-Believe,” a young woman, Erin, has perfected a particular role in which men desire her. She has become so adept, so practiced, that she doubts her ability to assume any other. Woods writes, “She has, she fears, mastered the art of performance to such a degree that she prefers it to the alternative. The alternative being that all the world’s a stage, but she’s not on it and thus, ceases to exist. The alternative being that if no one is watching her, Erin will quietly disappear.”

The above is just a sampler of the stories in this rich and varied collection. Each excavates the roles women and girls (and a few men and boys) assume and the ways they are bound to those roles and altered by them. Most women, especially mothers—working moms, stay-at-home moms, beleaguered moms, single moms, and married moms—will recognize themselves in one or more of these tales. Perhaps not in the details, but in the broader strokes. In the ways society and family have programmed women to respond performatively as wives and mothers, fulfilling perceived obligations and expectations. Often without consciously noticing how what we once wanted for ourselves, how we conceived our lives unfolding, has been set aside and slowly subsumed by the day-to-day.

Lauren D. Woods’s The Great Grown-Up Game of Make-Believe did that rare and special thing. It surprised and intrigued me. It made me remember and consider who I’ve been and who I am now.