Shut Up, I Love You, I’ll Call You Tomorrow is a collection of short stories about a group of trans women in Chicago, following their parties and interpersonal dramas. Each story follows a particular character, but the women all appear in each others’ stories too, and the stories move forward in time, meaning that you build up tiny pictures of the characters as you make your way through the collection.
This is like getting to live vicariously through someone else’s friend group drama: you start to learn things about the major players, you can’t always remember who everyone is, but you’re interested nonetheless. My personal favourite parts were Joan’s attempts to make it in her comedy career (which looks at the state of modern comedy and what you have to give of yourself for fame) and the final story in the collection, exploring trying to disappear (and the darkly comic failure of just hoping a tornado will do the work for you).
The collection consciously never quite gives you everything, refusing to fill in every gap or explain who people are. Instead, you have to let the tangled drama take over.
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