"Boys and girls like you and me" is a book of short stories by Aryn
Kyle that I have recently read. 

Kyle's stories seem like facets of her own life and personality, warts
and all.  A British girl coming to America and having to adjust to the
local culture and navigate her way among cliques of popular girls. A
child of a traumatic divorce.  A college girl who does not care about
education, wants to smoke pot and drink instead. Somebody who does not
possess any particular talent or drive to succeed, but just happen to
be gifted with an ability to write and cursed with a bleeding heart.
A girl who fell deeply in love in high-school and was left devastated
afterwards. And then again, she fell for a married man. The second
time around the love was so destructive that she completely fell apart
and lost her desire to do anything but to love the person who is
neither deserving of her love nor man enough to be with her.

The characters/author is never quite grown or mature. She is
self-centered and inward looking. Her own mental anguish crowds out
everything else in life.  One of the characters decides to join Peace
Corps as a means of escaping her own wretched existence. When she
finds out that she would likely be doing something less than glamorous
and heroic in the faraway place, she quickly drops the idea.

Recently, my short-stories benchmark is "Drown" by Junot Diaz. I think
this book measures up. Kyle is being forthright and talks about what
she knows best: her own life. Her style is unsophisticated. She does
not bother with long descriptions. Instead, she grabs the reader's
attention with brutal, occasionally over the top, honesty. How about
this for a beginning paragraph? "[my boyfriend], I knew, was not in
love with me the way that I was in love with him and would quickly
abandon the idea of me without the actual me around to keep him
distracted with bl0wjobs."  She then keeps the reader off balance with
dispassionate narrative that reveals how f@cked up the lives and the
relationships of her characters are. She does not sugar coat the
stories with happy endings. Neither does she dwell on particularly
gruesome scenes. She just gives the glimpse of the proverbial train
wreck with the twisted metal mingled with body parts and then quietly
walks away.

Her plots are themselves often gripping. Nobody reads my shidt,
anyway, right? So it does not matter if I throw in spoilers to a few
stories I liked best.

 * A teenage girl puts out for her drama teacher. Out of teen angst
   and boredom I am guessing.  The teacher is in desperate and
   hopeless love with her talented but vain classmate. He makes love
   to this stand-in with closed eyes without ever kissing her.

 * A spoiled pre-teen jock goes on a Mediterranean cruise with his
   divorced father. By chance, his peer from a poor family gets to
   accompany him. The father brings his new girlfriend who is
   significantly younger than he is. The girl quit her job and dropped
   everything to come on this trip. However, the father ends up going
   to the ship's casino and chasing tour guides most of the trip while
   his son is playing games in the arcade. So the girl spends her time
   with the poor boy: shopping for his family's presents and visiting
   antique sites. The boy falls in his first puppy-love. Later, the
   father sends the boys away from the cabin for the evening while the
   girl, it seems, needs a good helping of liquor to get with the
   program.  To the poor boy the whole thing feels like a betrayal. He
   goes on deck and sees a once-in-a-lifetime sight of an incredible
   Mediterranean sunset. He noticed that the father left so he runs
   back to the cabin to tell the girl about the sight only to find her
   in a drunken imbecile stupor.

 * The family of a middle-school girl just moves from England to the US.
   While living in England the girl's American father cheated on her
   mother. The mother wants to get away from the place so they come to
   the US. The mother finds everything there foreign. She clings to
   her daughter as the only thing left dear to her. Meanwhile, the
   girl struggles for acceptance in school. She is treated like an
   outsider by the clique of girls. Finally, she is given a chance to
   get in by jointly humiliating a bumbling naive classmate who
   thought that the British girl was her friend. Then, the British
   girl is invited to a sleepover party to the house of one of the
   popular girls. The British girl sees this as an opportunity to gain
   further acceptance. However, her mother finds this American custom
   objectionable and does not allow her to go. Her father sees nothing
   wrong with it. The parents get into an argument which quickly
   becomes heated with the mother's hatred of America and the father's
   infidelity coming up. While her mother is sobbing in the bathroom,
   the girl quietly asks the father if she can go to the sleepover
   party.

I usually find it hard to relate to exactly these topics covered by
women-writers. But I guess Kyle has just caught me at the right (or
wrong?) time. Oh, well.