Blog Post #7: Drinking Coffee Elsewhere

In ZZ Packer's book of short stories titled Drinking Coffee Elsewhere, I chose to read the story "Drinking Coffee Elsewhere."

The title refers to the main character's coping strategy, namely pretending to be somewhere else when the pain she is enduring becomes too much. “I remembered the morning after my mother’s funeral. I had been given milk to settle my stomach; I’d pretended it was coffee. I imagined myself drinking coffee elsewhere.”

In this story a character, Dina, remembers a moment when she ran away from a boy who offered to carry her bags home from the store. Instead of accepting the offer, she remembers running off in fright, dropping everything in her hasty flight because she was afraid he'd see the shabby neighborhood she lived in.

As a college student, she is a similar woman, though she uses dark humor and sarcasm to separate herself from her classmates at Yale instead of physically running away. Dina lives in a fantasyland, where she needs no one. But in reality she has no one.

Packer uses very detailed descriptions and paints a picture of her characters and she uses similes and metaphors to help the reader envision exactly what she is try to convey.

“The girl turned to me, smiling weakly, as though her triumph was not in getting me to open the door but in the fact that she was able to smile at all when she was so accustomed to crying. She was large, but not obese, and crying had turned her face to color of raw chicken.”

Her use of humor and sarcasm also helps the reader get a deeper connection into the minds of the characters. During orientation games, when she is asked what inanimate object she would like to be, Dina replies "a revolver." As a result, she is referred for psychiatric counseling and assigned a "suicide single" dorm room.

Packer uses a variety of descriptions and writing techniques to engage her readers, and they work, you can lose yourself in her stories.