Send Nudes by Saba Sams
Send Nudes (2022) is a promising new collection of short stories focused on and around – and occasionally, on the periphery – of what it means to be a woman. Told over ten quietly assertive stories, Saba Sams’ debut allows its reader a glimpse into the messiness and painful contradictions of girlhood.
Send Nudes is full of perceptive, raw accounts from girls growing into women everywhere – in clubs at closing time, on pub toilets, at free spirited music festivals and on make-do beach holidays. What ties the protagonists of each story together is a primal sense of what growing into yourself looks like – often chaotic, sometimes teetering on menacing, and yet always perfectly real. As they battle their own demons and others’ and as they fight for a space to fit into, they reveal some wonderfully incisive universal truths about womanhood.
In ‘The Bread’, my favourite story, a young woman survives the days after having an abortion by baking sourdough bread – the raw and painful episodes are interspersed by lovely descriptions around her kitchen, creating an unlikely equilibrium born from a scarring experience.
“The day after my abortion, I mixed the ingredients for a loaf of bread. I’m not usually interested in baking, but I had an urge to follow instructions. The mixture felt warm and loose, almost bodily, like sticking my fingers inside a stomach.”
It is in descriptions like this that Sams’ writing really shines through. Bringing forth not only the vulnerability and the weight of honesty of certain situations, but also the consistent (and sometimes desperate) striving for control that can seem like a well-known coping mechanism to many of us, makes her an exceptionally relatable writer.
In this regard, most of the stories are inherently about choice, and about women brave and selfish enough to make them. In the first story, ‘Tinderloin’, a young woman gets into a compromising relationship with an older man, only to realise she cares more for his dog than him. She might not know this consciously, but she makes the choice to take the dog with her nonetheless, and in the act she is redeemed by this sliver of control.
In another story titled ‘Blue 4eva’, three young girls are on vacation with their parents, enjoying the freedom and fun the trip affords them. As the days progress and tensions develop and relieve in different familial settings, each girl makes a choice seemingly without realising the weight it may carry over their holiday.
In the story ‘Send Nudes’, a woman struggling with her weight begins a meaningless chat with a stranger on a dating app against the backdrop of an impending natural catastrophe.
"It's fair to say that some adjectives sound better than others. Using the better adjectives is only a little white lie, like wearing shapewear, or having lowlights put in at the salon.”
When he tells her to send him nudes, she begins to stall for time as she contemplates the many possible outcomes. In the end, she takes the plunge, but it doesn’t pay off in the way you’d expect.
In ‘The Mothers and The Girls’, the friendship of a pair of schoolgirls, presented as a solid unified entity throughout the story, begins to fall apart as they get to know a boy who shows interest in both of them without discrimination. When they press him to choose between the two of them and he refuses, the girls take the matter into their own hands – the result of which is perhaps the most chilling ending in the collection.
In all these instances, while the outcomes aren’t always what one might hope for, they are the choices made and enforced by the protagonists, and so they are always worth it.
In the stories where the choice isn’t theirs, the girls and women suffer not only the consequences – the narrative often ends before that – but more so the torment of the lead-up. That sense of something unknown coming permeates these stories, making them slippery in the hand and yet painfully simple at the same time. After all, the choice isn’t always ours. But life is certainly better when we make them – or so Sams would have you believe.
The writing digs deep into the many convoluted feelings that come with budding new friendships, uneasily blended families, sexual awakenings, and learning how to truly live in your own body. It is sometimes feral, often unflinching, packed with something deeper and yet something ultimately effortless. It’s like reading stories of your own friends, sisters, mothers – of yourself.
The stories of Send Nudes deftly chart the treacherous terrain of growing up and into women we want to become, with lyrical lines pierced by grotesque sensory descriptions, and protagonists who never veer into stereotypes or predictable character tropes. It is a dazzling debut, and Saba Sams is certainly a writer to keep an eye on.
Fruzsina Gál is an aspiring writer, born in Hungary but living in Australia. She has been a reader all her life, and her first short story, 'The Turul' was published in Griffith University's 2018 anthology, Talent Implied. Her writing is often focussed on identity and the effects of immigration on the self. You can find her online at www.fruzsinagal.com or @thenovelconversation.