57 pages • 1 hour read
Danielle EvansThe Office of Historical Corrections
Fiction | Short Story Collection | Adult | Published in 2020A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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Beta“Why Won’t Women Just Say What They Want”Chapter Summaries & Analyses
“Why Won’t Women Just Say What They Want” Summary
A “genius artist” disappears from the public for an extended period. People speculate about where he went, then gradually care less and less. A woman he once dated, referred to as the Model/Actress Who Dated Him a While Ago, says that she hopes he fell into a volcano.
One day, the artist reemerges and begins apologizing to people in his life. Unlike his past apologies, which were riddled with “caveat or redirection” and rarely contained actual apologies (119), his new apologies are grand and sincere. The artist has a long list of ex-wives and infidelities, who are referred to by names like Former Personal Assistant, Short-Suffering Second Ex-wife, Model/Actress, The Guy He Made Homophobic Jokes About in College but Still Asked to Suck Him off Sometimes, and more. He also has a daughter, whom he upset by asking out her SAT tutor and friend. He apologizes to all of them with grand gestures.
After his apologies, the artist sets up an art gallery replicating all the apologies and calls it Forgiveness. At the end of the gallery, he stands at the mouth of a volcano, ready to apologize to anyone who is not satisfied. He invites the people he apologized to, but most decline, feeling varying amounts of anger and embarrassment toward him.
One woman comes forward to the volcano—The Girl Who Had Wondered All These Years What to Call It—and the artist struggles with what to say to her. He feels as though he has already apologized for everything. She pushes him into the volcano, and he dies in the hot liquid within.
The people to whom he apologized react in various ways. Most don’t care that he is gone and move on. Some think he was being careless and fell, while others think he planned to die this way to make it someone else’s fault. His daughter thinks for years that it was a trick and that he will return one day. The Model/Actress guesses correctly: He planned for his apology to work and never thought he would end up in the volcano. He expected to be absolved, incorrectly believing “the Forgiveness was his to declare” (129).
The Model/Actress, who has been planning a volcano-themed makeup line after joking about the artist’s disappearance, decides to move forward with the collection despite his death. She thinks back to the year they spent together before they were famous. She told the artist that what she wanted out of life was “everything.” He jokingly referred to her as ruthless, but she reflects on how “real” and “necessary” that ruthlessness was in her career.
“Why Won’t Women Just Say What They Want” Analysis
Evans does not use names in the story “Why Won’t Women Just Say What They Want,” instead titling the characters after their relation to the artist. This style not only creates universality—making it applicable to many, nameless people instead of just one person—but also centers the narrative on the only male character present in the text. This is reflective of the artist’s arrogance and disingenuous nature, as he pompously and grandiosely—though never sincerely—apologizes to the people from his past. He believes that people exist only in relation to himself, and the naming of the characters reflects these feelings. This also reflects the nature of patriarchy to flatten women and define them in relation to men; though the artist occasionally apologizes to men, he mostly apologizes to the many nameless women he has harmed.
After the artist disappears, it becomes clear that his arrogance is unfounded. The women are disinterested, first in his apologies and then in his death. Few go to his gallery, and each of the women continues their lives as normal after his death. Ironically, these unnamed characters whose identities initially revolve around the artist don’t focus on him at all. This reveals the lie in patriarchal ideology; dehumanizing someone doesn’t actually make them less human. The Model/Actress moves forward with her volcano-themed makeup line despite the connection to the artist and his death, reflecting her “ruthlessness” but also a subversion of power dynamics. While the artist has used her and others throughout the story to make artwork, she ends the story using him to make something of her own.
The artist’s efforts to apologize further develop the theme of Running from Versus Reckoning with the Past. In the artist’s eyes, he is reckoning with his past by issuing apologies to the women he wronged and setting up his gallery. However, in his arrogance, he fails to see that “Forgiveness,” as he titles his gallery, is not something that he can control but is something that he needs to earn. As the narrator explains, he sets up the volcano despite the danger it holds because “he had counted on absolution. He had counted on love. […] He thought the Forgiveness was his to declare” (129). The artist’s lack of understanding and arrogance reveal that it is not enough to simply face the past; one must truly engage with it and, through empathy, understand what happened to appropriately deal with it. As the title explains, he never truly understood women, and instead wished they would just “Say What They Want,” rather than putting in the effort to truly understand them.
