One local writer’s vision of make-believe living
A review of Lauren D. Woods’ The Great Grown-up Game of Make Believe
By Samantha Neugebauer
The stories in Lauren D. Woods' debut collection, The Great Grown-up Game of Make Believe (Autumn House Press, October 2025), pendulum between the speculative and the real, embodying how many people live their lives: half in imagination, half in the material world. Whether narrated by a mother needing a break, a high school boy preparing to enlist in the Marines, or a piece of fine jewelry, these tales tremble with an unusual sense of stasis and imbalance, like someone who knows they’re susceptible to vertigo, yet keeps glancing over the edge of a high balcony anyway.
Woods, who lives in D.C., was a 2024 Washington, D.C. Arts and Humanities Fellow for Fiction, and The Great Grown-up Game of Make Believe is the winner of the 2024 Autumn House Fiction Prize, chosen by author Kristen Arnett. It’s quite a varied collection with twenty-eight stories (although a couple pieces are no longer than a paragraph). Among its various preoccupations, one thematic standout is the pleasure of solitude, explored in both the most fantastical and most quotidian stories. In “Proportions,” a harried mother shrinks in the presence of her husband and children, but grows in size again once she is on her own and in the presence of her own (shrunken) mother. Likewise, in “Bear Sightings,” another mother in the midst of an early-morning newborn shift fantasizes about leaving her husband and disappearing “into the Shenandoah Valley by the time John got up for coffee.” She wonders: “Didn’t every young mother dream some version of this?”
And doesn’t every writer, for that matter?
The collection also engages in structural experimentation; in “Is She a Witch? A Quiz,” for example, readers of a certain age can relive the self-reflective thrills of quizzes they might have enjoyed in Seventeen or Glamour. One question asks:
“Can the tinkling of a piano sometimes be heard from her apartment late at night? And if so, which of these might you identify?
Beethoven
Handel
A classical melody of unknown origin
A haunting tune that occasionally leaves you melancholy”
Yet it’s Woods’ more realistic offerings, such as “Nine-Hundred Miles to Tampa” and “This is Happiness,” that leave the strongest impression on me. In the former, a teenage father struggles with the responsibilities of being a new dad and the doldrums of unrewarding, low-paying work at a call center. His condition is shared with his parents, with whom he lives; his father is “an outdoorsman but spends every day in an office crunching numbers.” Meanwhile, “This is Happiness” is more scene than fully-realized short story. Taking place over an evening meal at a Virginia farmhouse, two couples drink wine while sharing details of their life’s important events and their theories on life, calling to mind some of Raymond Carver’s best couple scenes or the unforgettable dinner party in Denis Johnson’s “Silences,” a story from his final collection, The Largesse of the Sea Maiden.
At times, however, there’s a slipperiness and underdevelopment to Woods’ stories; or, in other words, a lack of precision and depth in the worldbuilding, including a feeling like many of these tales aren’t rooted in a fairytale or surreal tradition. This is most evident in her more allegorical tales, like “The Shape-shifter” and “Proportions.” In the first, since the story’s underlying message is straightforward (man wants to control women), a sophisticated reader may find themselves wanting more character nuance, a richer setting, unusual syntax, or something to chew on beyond the story’s familiar fantastical conceit. Still, Woods gives readers several fun insights into the practical details of life as a shape-shifting animal-woman. When the protagonist is a swan, “her neck [gets] twisted in the bedsheets,” while in another instance, as an emu, she relishes in “being tall, high on spindly legs and with no iridescence or grace.”
Nonetheless, one of the collection’s most moving pieces, “Skin like a Snake,” is also one of its shortest. In this tea-cake-sized tale, Colette, a waitress, writes poetry on the side but never manages to get anything published. Over time, she wishes she could “shed [her] skin like a snake” and “become someone else.” One day, her co-workers find her anonymous poetry notebook, and in the tradition of mean girls everywhere, “they take turns reading passages in cruel voices.” Overhearing them, Colette experiences a transformation, but in true “Monkey’s Paw” fashion, it is not the change she’d wished for. In the end, Colette becomes someone who makes fun of her own writing, someone “cold and wet and new.” The story is moving because it feels like the start of an end for Colette. Will she write again, dream again? I wonder. Or will she grow bitter? Will she stop reading altogether? Ultimately, this is the choice for every writer, reader, and person. And with Woods’ first collection, we meet a writer who is committed to keeping the notebook open and writing another tale, no matter what.
Buy your copy of The Great Grown-up Game of Make Believe from Bookshop or your favorite local bookstore.
Learn more about Lauren D. Woods on her website at www.laurendwoods.com. And check out her book vending machine, located in D.C.’s Western Market, LitBox. Listen to a podcast with the author here.
Lauren has three book events for The Great Grown-up Game of Make Believe coming up this week, all in the D.C. area
On Wednesday 10/22 at 7 pm, Lauren will be in conversation with Laura Scalzo at Kramers in Washington, D.C. Register here.
On Sunday 10/26 at 1 pm, Lauren will be in conversation with Steph Liberatore at Barnes & Noble Potomac Yard in Alexandria, Va. Learn more here.
On Sunday 10/26 at 5:30 pm, Lauren will be a reader at Reston Readings at Reston’s Used Book Shop in Reston, Va. Learn more here.
Lauren D. Woods, originally from the Dallas area, now lives and writes in Washington, DC, where she was a 2024-25 Washington, DC Arts and Humanities Fellow for Fiction. Her writing has appeared as a spotlighted story in The Best Small Fictions, as well as in The Antioch Review, The Normal School, Passages North, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Red Rock Review, Southern Humanities Review, and Lunch Ticket, among others. Lauren works in consulting and lives with her husband, four children, two cats, and a guinea pig. The Great Grown-Up Game of Make-Believe is her debut collection.
Samantha Neugebauer is a lecturer at N.Y.U.’s D.C. campus and a senior editor at Painted Bride Quarterly. To read more of her work, visit: samanthaneugebauer.com.
