Kathleen Collins was a writer, civil rights activist, filmmaker and film professor who died at age 46 in 1988. Her critically admired feature film, Losing Ground, was restored and given its first theatrical release in 2015. Whatever Happened to Interracial Love? is the first publication of her short fiction.
This collection is filled with nostalgia for lost moments of happiness and belonging--in a romance, in an extraordinary group of young friends or a seemingly perfect family. Collins understands the delicate intricacies of a failing relationship, and has a special interest in the unresolvable strangeness of life. In one story, a hairdresser accidentally and inexplicably tells a client's future; in another, an uncle "soaked his life in sorrow," keeping the household awake every night with "his great heartrending sobbing that went on hour after relentless hour until the morning, when he would fall asleep and sleep the day away only to awaken again at night and begin this vigorous lamentation."
In many of Collins's stories, conflicts involving race and gender play out in the lives of intellectual and idiosyncratic people living in Manhattan, Paris and rural New England during the early 1960s, when the civil rights movement was roaring. She vividly evokes the exhilaration and apprehension of that time, and the struggle to lead a life in the midst of sexual and racial revolution. These stories fill a gap in the literature, whether or not you knew a gap was there, and they speak to the present like a sharp-eyed worldly aunt who has seen it all. --Sara Catterall