I've been thinking a lot lately about the famous opening sequence of Up, the Pixar animated film. That movie begins with a wordless montage of a marriage, Carl and Ellie's marriage: its youthful giddiness, the pain of infertility and the long goodbye of Ellie's death in old age.
The montage takes less than four-and-a-half minutes and, yet, contains the emotional depths of a much longer film or novel about a marriage. Relying solely on words, Elizabeth McCracken's Seven Stories About Tammy does much the same for the family saga.
As its title bluntly announces, Seven Stories About Tammy is composed of seven interrelated short stories about a family's encounters with their eldest son's girlfriend and eventual wife, an older woman named Tammy. McCracken's story sequence has appeared earlier in a literary magazine, as well as in the 2025 anthology of The Best American Short Stories. But, having it available in standalone book form is just the right vessel for this family montage. Not every piece of fiction, after all, fits into the prefab format of a novel or a single short story. The only downside is that this 70-page book is so tiny — the size of a pamphlet, really — that I misplaced it repeatedly around my house. Whenever I found it again, though, I felt like something rich and strange had been returned to me out of the jumble of the mundane.
We first meet Tammy when the Harkin family does: in the mid-1970s when eldest son, Morris, who's been living in Florida, brings her home to Boston for dinner. Here's our omniscient narrator describing that first encounter:
They had never met anyone from Florida, only people who ended up there, as if by gravity. Tammy was tall and angular, stood with her hands in her own back pockets — blue jeans, ironed. Morris’s jeans were ironed now, too. By her? Or had she put Morris to work at the ironing board? She seemed like that sort of woman, efficient and ruthless, with beautiful manners.
On that evening, the family "parlor game" of "how old is she?" will begin, because, we're flatly told: "Morris was twenty-seven. She wasn't."
In the third story, set about 15 years later, insecure middle child, Victoria, visits Tammy and Morris, now married, at their high-rise apartment in Philadelphia. Victoria, who's struggled with see-sawing weight all her young life, is served a shallow bowl of soup. Here's some dinner table dialogue:
“Do you want more?” asked Tammy in a friendly way.
“Oh, no thank you!” [Victoria] said. “I’m saving room for dinner.”
In the pause that followed she understood that this was dinner. There was no further course, not so much as a cheese plate. She began in her head to tell the story to her mother. Mortification could be useful, if you could convert it to a story, ... though usually you had to sit with the mortification a while to be able to soften it up enough to fashion it into something for somebody else to admire.
What do we make of this moment? Is Tammy really a woman who, as Victoria thinks, "was never so happy as when other people were stupid"? Or is that a judgment born out of Victoria's own self-loathing?
Wielding precise-but-plain language, McCracken engages that central question of whether or not we ever really see ourselves or each other; twisting it like a helix, both within stories and throughout the long arc of this story sequence. In the penultimate story, the family (minus dad, Dennis, who's died) gathers at a rental house in Rhode Island for the holidays. Younger Harkin son, Porter, a recovering alcoholic, takes center stage here. Years ago, his drunken kiss of Tammy's shoulder on the night of her and Morris' wedding changed the course of Porter's life, or so goes the story he tells himself. Porter, naturally, blames Tammy for his diminished status in the family, the effort he has to make to be "picked up on the family radio."
However you categorize it, Seven Stories About Tammy is a brilliant piece of writing. This book is so funny, profound, and short that you may just want to read it over again, immediately, as I did.
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