Falling While Sitting Down: Stories

Book excerpt: What does it mean to be human? How does a person find meaning in his or her life when everything's falling apart? Falling While Sitting Down is a short story collection about dealing with loneliness and discontent while balancing hope and despair. Ultimately, this book's stories deal with finding meaning in a seemingly meaningless world. The first four stories in this collection, written by Joshua Fields Millburn, discuss the struggles we face as we attempt to discover the meaning of our lives. "It's All So Quiet in Brooklyn," this collection's longest piece, follows a young but aging musician as he approaches thirty and finds himself coping with loneliness and depression in the aftermath of several life-changing events. He feels utterly alone, so he leaves Ohio to search for meaning in the most unlikely place: Bed-Stuy Brooklyn. "A Radically Attenuated History of Generation X" is, as the title suggests, an incredibly short story that attempts to summarize a particular ethos for an entire generation through the eyes of two characters on a dinner date. The title story, "Falling While Sitting Down," follows an unnamed boy through eighteen years of growing up in an extraordinarily dysfunctional family, showing the emotional muscles it takes to survive such circumstances. The collection's final story, "Loneliest Man," considers the loneliness and real-life costs of poor relationship decisions from the point of view of a particularly troubled man. As a bonus, three talented young writers--Colin Wright, Chase Night, and Mark D. Robertson--contributed to this collection, expanding the narrative beyond the scope of Joshua Fields Millburn's four stories. The seven stories in this collection vary drastically, but they all share one thing in common: each story is about what it's like to be a human being during incredibly complex times.