“Yes,” a story about a newly engaged couple’s road trip to Reno with the groom’s mother, brims with an understated adolescent expansiveness and a tolerance for bad decision-making.

The narrator of “The Things We Know Nothing About” is pregnant and creates elaborate justifications for her drinking.

The married couple from the title story reappear several times, and their stories seethe with unhappinesses about the difficulties of getting pregnant. Over the course People Like You‘s nine stories, Malone proves herself a master of revealing subtext her characters would rather not think about. Suddenly the small criticisms and unsaid slights have a new meaning. Two, there are three other women present, and they are all pregnant. Parties are strangers and someone else’s idea of music and the overt pressure to talk to the strangers over the volume of the music while appearing to have a good time. I look around the party and realize two things. The prolonged and petty exchange paints an excruciating portrait of familiarity bordering on nastiness, and Malone follows it with a paragraph that blows the story open: Malone draws the argument out for longer than most writers would-three and a half pages of the couple snapping at each other for missing the exit, calling their friend and asking for directions, hiding in the car so as not to ruin the surprise.

The title story of Margaret Malone’s debut collection begins with an unhappy married couple getting invited to a surprise party, getting lost on the way, and arguing in the car.

People Like You by Margaret Malone