"Like Having a Malt Whiskey": The Strong Taste of Anxiety in Jackie Kay’s Short Fiction

While many studies on Black British Women's Writing deal with issues related to culture, ethnicity and race, this paper seeks to contribute to broadening this field of criticism by reading Jackie Kay's rarely discussed debut story volume Why Don't You Stop Talking (2002), which barely touches upon the abovementioned issues, as an example of psychological short fiction. With their poignant, humorous explorations of anxiety disorders, which are best taken in small quantities "like [one would have] a malt whisky" (Kay qtd. in Rustin 2012: 1), Kay's stories belong to what is a dominant subgenre in British and Irish short fiction (Malcolm 2012: 74), a subgenre marked by a preference for "moments of sudden revelation" and "sharply observed details" and "geared to analysing psychological changes behind factual events" (Stanzal & Zacharasiewicz, qtd. in Nagy 2009: 18).
This paper examines how Kay constructs the maddening realities of characters suffering from a wide range of anxieties by building up her narratives towards moments of revelation (a characteristic of psychological fiction) and making use of such highly appropriate narrative techniques as mirroring, interior monologue, the iceberg principle, and an array of unusual but apt metaphors and motifs. The paper will also show how such a literary-psychological approach allows for a more positive reading of the stories' open-endedness than is offered in the few existing studies of Kay's debut story volume. In addition, the paper's cross-disciplinary approach also firmly situates Kay's work within the contemporary tradition of British short fiction and illustrates that Black British Women's Writing need not be exclusively treated as migrant writing.