O Street
First edition cover
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| Author | Corrina Wycoff |
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| Cover artist | Robin Hann (photo) Melissa C. Lucar (cover design) |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Short stories |
| Publisher | OV Books/University of Illinois Press |
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Publication date
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April 2, 2007 |
| Media type | Print (paperback) |
| Pages | 184 |
| ISBN | |
O Street is a 2007 short story collection written by Corrina Wycoff. Called a "novel-in-stories" by OV Books, it explores the troubled life of young professional Beth Dinard from the perspective of the character herself as well as others around her. O Street was nominated for a Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Debut Fiction in 2007.
The ten stories collected in O Street revolve around the life of young professional Elizabeth Dinard, who has escaped an impoverished and abusive childhood in New Jersey but still suffers its effects in adulthood. Each story, told from the perspective of Beth herself or one of the people around her, explores a different period of her troubled life.
In a 2007 interview with Time Out Chicago, Wycoff said that the stories were based on the "political truth" that "single mothers fall through the cracks in this country, and the cracks grow in proportion to these women's economic challenges, making inaccessible the so-called American Dream". She explained that, though she drew on her own experiences as a single mother, the stories were not autobiographical.
Michael Upchurch of The Seattle Times wrote that the book recognizes "how even the most toxic family connections have some kind of love threaded through them", and notes that "its heroine, even in the worst circumstances, keeps fierce hold of her dignity". He added:
Wycoff's primary aim is to alight on the story of Beth and her mother from every angle. But behind this is a broader ambition: to show how riddled with pitfalls any attempted escape from the American underclass is. The hazards, Wycoff shows, are psychological as much as they are physical or economic. The isolation Beth feels from every form of social stability undermines almost all her connections with people, no matter how responsibly or industriously she conducts herself.
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