An Indoor Kind of Girl

That night or a week later, get blackout drunk and think about how unhappy with your life you are. How tired you are of so many of the things you’ve chosen to define yourself by. Why on earth did you cut your bangs like that? Girls like you are becoming lawyers, girls like you have at least been to Europe. All you have is your stupid fucking haircut.

Someone at a party describes you as an “indoor kind of girl.” What does that even mean? You don’t know, but you spend the following week obsessing about it. You watch three seasons of ‘Keeping Up with the Kardashians’ in two days. You get a pet turtle. You absent-mindedly paint what ends up looking like your high school’s football coach, but naked. You go backpacking in Australia for a few months. You try speaking with a New York accent in public, just to see if people like that version of you better. The comment still haunts you. An “indoor kind of girl.” You feel like you’re that person, but you’re not that person.

Lists

The National Post – Books – #1 on the best-seller list for fiction

Feminist Press – Our Favourite Short Stories – ‘Gay For Her’

Librairie Drawn & Quarterly – Fiction Bestsellers

Press

Rookie Mag – “In a slight 68 pages, the stories cover turtle infestations, hallucinogenic visits from a baby given up for adoption, the politics of mural painting, and intimate relations between zookeepers. The collection creates a world that is totally captivating and enchanting, and that is completely Barnet’s.”

The Winnipeg Review – “This is the millennial experience distilled into literary form.”

The Walrus– “Hard to put down.”

Librairie Drawn & Quarterly – “Barnet has the dark sense of humor of George Saunders mixed with the bizarre attraction of Miranda July.”

Excerpts

Best Canadian Stories (2017) – ‘Cherry Sun’ anthologized

Peach Mag – A Plot of Ocean

Interviews

Maudlin House – Exploring Stories & Friendship with Frankie Barnet

Translations

Una chica de interior, Paloma Ediciones (Spanish)

Fille d’intérieur, Les éditions de ta mère (French)

Frankie Barnet

Frankie Barnet is a Montreal-based writer and the author of An Indoor Kind of Girl (Metatron, 2016), which has been translated and published in French (Les éditions de ta mère) and Spanish (Paloma Ediciones) and had a story from it included in Best Canadian Stories anthology (Biblioasis, 2017). Her work has appeared in Peach Mag, Joyland, PRISM International, The Vault (With/Out Pretend), plasma dolphin, and Papirmasse. She is a graduate of the Creative Writing program at Concordia University and recently received her Masters of Fine Arts (Fiction) from Syracuse University.