In this intriguing collection of short stories, Wendy Perriam gives a sharp insight into the private and often screwed-up lives of a host of quirky women, revealing fantasies that should remain secret and exposing every foible. Plunging readers immediately into a world that every woman can identify with on some level, Perriam is both witty and wicked. Her cutting observations bring into sharp relief the fears, insecurities and passions of her oddball characters and while every tale is tinged with sadness, there are moments of triumph and enlightenment.

Angry, frustrated, desperate, confused, even proud, they may be deluding themselves, but the truth is laid out for all to see in the detail, the trivia.

Thoroughly absorbing, but easy to digest, Virgin in the Gym – and Other Stories is a feast of fantasy that will disgust, amuse, and provoke in equal measure.

Perriam takes her readers on a journey in someone else’s shoes, before promptly discarding them, leaving them to question their own failures and successes in life.

Pick it up and take a look into another world – one that is just a little bit too familiar.

The Informer

In her 15 novels, Wendy Perriam usually manages to shock, disturb and even make you laugh aloud at times, but it is in this, her second short-story collection, that she should prove to even her strongest critics why she continues to be one of the most talented and sadly, too often unappreciated, writers of her generation.

Passion well-hidden features in all 21 short stories. Her characters are all living on the knife-edge of life as they try to survive their daily lives. From religious obsession to the obsession of love, each story is filled with poignancy and warmth. Perriam’s characters are real to her and to you, the kind of people we pass on the street and barely see. She describes the ups and downs of life with a sensitivity and understanding that is very much part of the person she is. I can understand why Fay Weldon describes herself as Perriam’s greatest fan.

The American Issue

The boundary between imagination and everyday reality may be flexible and porous, but most of us, most of the time, work on the assumption that a boundary exists and we succeed in defining it in a way that allows us to get on with our lives. What happens though if, under life’s stresses and exigencies, we can no longer distinguish boundaries: if short story becomes reality? This is the question Wendy Perriam explores so perceptively in Virgin in the Gym and Other Stories.

Readers of Perriam’s earlier novels will be familiar with her deep humanity and wicked wit. In this collection of stories she trains her sensitive eye on a cast of characters who, varied as they are, share a dangerous vulnerability, mental instability that topples them into fantasies that sometimes may be healing, but more often do harm.

Sometimes the obsession arises from the longings and insecurities of sex. When Rowan decides to impress her office colleagues by faking a holiday complete with lover, along with her tan, her romantic imaginings seem comical but harmless enough, indeed therapeutic in view of her crushing claustrophobic home life. In another story, where Beth is forced to encounter her ex husband and his new wife, the unbearable pain of sexual jealousy threatens to destroy them all.

Perriam also explores the no man’s land around belief and unbelief. In “One Million Rosaries” an old woman’s delusions, inflated by thwarted desire, lead her to religious mania. In another, doubt is routed (delusion again?) when the grieving Carla consults Madam Martinez, most unpromising of clairvoyants. “No Room at the Inn” tells the tale of an oppressed wife whose meeting with a “surprisingly refined” beggar prompts her to a brave act of Christmas charity towards a decidedly unrefined down and out. “Could he be a sort of Christ figure, come again, and hoping this time there might be room in the inn?” she muses.

Fans of Perriam’s writing will be glad to recognise some welcome trademarks, and at this point I should issue a health warning. Maybe it's best not to read this book when you’re feeling hungry because, as usual, there are descriptions of food on practically every page, dripping with sensuous detail. She uses food, its look and texture, taste and smell and feel, not as mere scene dressing, but, transformed by the imagination of her characters, almost as an extra protagonist in a scene.

From confined to untrammelled. That perhaps sums up the journey Perriam takes us on throughout this collection. In these stories, confinement is a pressure cooker where restrictions of all kinds – age, mental frustration, loss of love, loss of control and feelings of helplessness – force each character beyond the bounds of behaviour generally regarded as safe or “normal”. As we have seen, this sometimes leads to freedom but in other cases it ends in desperation and the disintegration of personality.

Under the pressure and stresses of modern life, most of us have looked into the abyss at some time. Maybe some of us have succumbed to living our fantasies for a while to make reality more bearable. The point is though, most of us recognise the fantasies for what they are, stories that we create and control, so they don’t take over our lives. But as Perriam shows, for the vulnerable it may not be so easy.

Sea of Faith Magazine