SmokeLong Quarterly

Review by Sumitra Singam

Dear Sarah Fawn,

I read Abbreviate [Small Harbor, 2025] with the smallest version of myself, the little girl who hides inside me waiting for men’s axes to fall. Your collection was sometimes too big, sometimes just right (but never too small). In my job, I sit with people, mostly women, and listen to their disbelieved stories. It’s my story too, so I know what it is like to live a life you yourself can’t quite believe. You have to live in some interstitial space between too much and too little. Of course, the ‘you’ I mean here is the Sarah Fawn in the book – those parts of you that you have curated for us to see.

In your title story, the one with too many Sarahs, you tell us: “We are reduced, made as small as the letters that now signify ourselves.” It made me mad to think of a whole school of Sarahs being reduced to an initial and that, too, given them by a man. My name means “good friend,” and I know what it is like to grow up fulfilling that expectation. In “Unreliable Narrator,” you tell us what it was like for you to grow up with a name defined by your relationship to men. “At home, no one believes a woman who says she is frightened by the boys and men in her own family.”

In this collection, you draw that knife edge like you’ve hunkered down to eyeball it your whole life. In “Hug Your Mad,” you write, “You hug your mad when your uncle goes to jail for running over his ex-wife and everyone says he didn’t do it but if he did it was because she asked for it.” Just being a woman in the world is a provocation – Abbreviate makes this truth rise up from your bones, bare and honest.

The fruit of that provocation is “swinging the rope to loop like a noose around the pole they tell us to dance on, or like our father’s belts when we are bad.” I like the way you throw us in the violence, Sarah Fawn. It isn’t yours to apologise for anyway. Do you go out into the “dusty fields…full of yellow mustard” to explode like your aunt taught you in “Stomp”? She sounds like a badass. That’s the energy I’m drawn to in your collection. Underneath the unrelenting dismissal, objectification, and erasing, Abbreviate persists weed-like and defiant. You write, “I freeze. Afraid, I cannot seem to move. Then I decide I will not move.” I know what it is to have enough forbidden anger in you to propel a rocket. But you use that energy to spin out into the universe in this astounding collection.

You write, “Overhead are stories as big as the sky.” You pluck stories from the stars.

Sarah Fawn, I lay in bed and held your book above my head like it was the sky, brought it close so your words were all I could see, and the universe you hold inside you was thrown over me too. In close-up, your American universe was made of the same stars as my Malaysian one. The slipperiness of memory felt so familiar – “I wonder if truth is a star that eventually burns out.” I keep coming back to this quote, because I recognised it with the smallest part of myself.

Abbreviate offers us a host of selves – the ignored, the dismissed, the hurt – and threaded through, within, and between their fragments, there is a voice who moved through these stories and not only survived, but thrived.

I can read the way this collection cycles like the Ferris wheel in “Fair.” You used your voice to unmake the great joke in the title of that story. Perhaps you don’t want to become the mother who “circle(s) the yard alone” looking at “broken toys like the breaking bodies of her children.” I know from my own recovery the effort it takes to find your body, just to be in it. How simply standing still will quiver your muscles for hours afterwards. How this effort is essential so you don’t simply disappear.

Sarah Fawn, the day I read your title story, the one where boys can have the same name and still be told apart, but not girls, a male relative instructed my daughter, age nine, that she need not go to the effort of thinking for herself, that she just has to follow what men say. I felt the prickling, Sarah Fawn. I was almost out of my chair to use the body I spent years learning to inhabit. And then I thought of your voice simply holding firm, how you decided not to move. So I did exactly that. And my daughter? I don’t think she even heard him. She just skipped off in her own body. Loose, easy, free.

You can order Abbreviate by Sarah Fawn Montgomery now through your independent bookseller.

______________________________

Sumitra Singam is a Malaysian-Indian-Australian coconut who writes in Naarm/Melbourne. She travelled through many spaces, both beautiful and traumatic to get there and writes to make sense of her experiences. Her work has been published widely, nominated for a number of Best Of anthologies, and was selected for Best Microfictions 2024. She works as a psychiatrist and trauma therapist and runs workshops on how to write trauma safely, and the Yeah Nah reading series. She’ll be the one in the kitchen making chai (Where’s your cardamom?). You can find her and her other publication credits on Bluesky: @pleomorphic2 & sumitrasingam.squarespace.com