Alexander writes with a brash, comic, and socially sensitive touch that recalls Carol Shields. This isn’t hip, trendy, urban writing. It is unflinching, vivid, and frequently domestic. Nino Ricci described the collection as possessing ‘an unbridled urgency and wit.... At once eccentric and precisely observed, they seem to hum with the energy of everything in life that is unreasonable and can’t quite be contained.’
Joan Alexander’s stories are intelligent and sure-footed investigations of the darker sides of urban life. They begin with familiar situations -- the failure of a business, the death of a loved one, an affair that never gets physical -- but they chart the rough terrain of emotional trauma with unsettling precision.
Many of the stories in Lines of Truth and Conversation deal in the pangs and pumellings of loss in all its guises, but Alexander has a gift for bittersweet humour, and even her most harrowing stories are lightened by a sense of the comic continuity of life.