Tragedy strikes everyone in different ways. Meghan Bell’s short story collection Erase and Rewind specifically explores the tragic experiences of women in our time. Erase and Rewind promises to “probe the complexities of living as a woman in a skewed society,” and it absolutely delivers. Each story is about a modern struggle mostly encountered by women. 

The book opens with the titular story “Erase and Rewind,” a gut wrenching tale of a woman who uses her suddenly discovered time travel powers to erase her recent sexual assault. It’s something many who have experienced sexual harassment and violence, including myself, may wish for. The story confronts the fears many women face head on: wondering if they’ll be believed, if their assault was really their fault, feeling like a statistic rather than a person. Bell addresses these very sensitive issues with simultaneous bluntness and sensitivity, acknowledging the pain while questioning its helpfulness and impact on the situation.

Even with the same theme running throughout the book, each story has its own unique tone. Some situations are not so serious, like a girl having a crush on her coworker, while others are extremely dark, involving philandering spouses and dealing with the sudden death of a loved one. But all are examined with the aforementioned bluntness, which I found intriguing. My personal favourite was “Anything to Make You Happy,” which is about a woman who’s in love with a severely depressed man. When she says she loves him, he asks her “why?” Having been on both sides of this kind of relationship, I appreciate the simple articulation of the complex emotions. Why would you love me, when I feel like just an empty shell of myself? Why would you put yourself through this? Why don’t you leave when it’s clearly not going to get any better?

Bell always keeps one foot in darkness and the other in humour. The image of a plasticine person taking a piece off themselves to form a friend is both funny and horrifying in its implications. The name “Captain Canada” for a theoretical superhero made me snort more than once. In my eyes, the humour is what keeps the stories from sinking into sad navel gazing. There’s no feeling of “woe is me, pity my existence, I am the paragon of suffering,” which I personally despise. I prefer Bell’s attitude of acknowledging the pain but finding the humour in it as well. Sometimes you can only laugh through the pain.

But sometimes, even laughter cannot diminish the pain.  While I love a good tragedy, by the end of Erase and Rewind, I felt a little exhausted. The humour granted some levity, yes, but there’s only so much depressing narrative you can take. Bell is unafraid to confront hard topics and I admire that, but her stories offer few resolutions to them. Most of her characters don’t seem to grow or learn a lot. They’re all very sad, and the story implies they’re going to remain sad for the foreseeable future. These characters seem to move from point A to point B in a mostly straight line. I liked Bell’s examination of difficult and dark subjects, but I was also unsatisfied by the lack of real character arcs in a lot of the stories.

Overall, Erase and Rewind is fundamentally a good book. It’s dark but still humorous and not languishing in self pity. The plotlines are somehow both mundane and intriguing. Bell’s wordcraft is superb with many sentences that jumped out at me as clever. However, if you’re looking for character arcs and possibly learning to grow from these dark situations, you won’t find them here. But maybe that’s the point. In real life, you don’t always have perfect ideas, you’re not always free of internalized prejudice, and there isn’t always a clear answer. So I suppose Erase and Rewind works in that particular arena: Sometimes, life really, really sucks, and you just have to find a way to keep on living it.