A Retired Teacher, a Useless Adult Son, and an Immaculate Conception in the Bathtub

The title is doing two jobs at once. Shine, Pamela! Shine! is the kind of self-pep-talk Pamela might catch herself muttering between online-dating disasters - and the title's two exclamation marks are exactly the sort of forced cheerfulness Pamela uses, throughout the story, to manage a life that has not, by middle age, delivered most of what she had been taught to expect. Pamela is a newly retired teacher. She is, in the story's framing, "thoroughly divorced but optimistic." Her ex-husband has remarried, predictably, a younger woman. Her thirty-year-old son still lives at home, contributes nothing, and gives off the kind of low-grade emotional unavailability that has become his entire personality. Her dates are all bald or boring or both. She is, in the brisk Kate Atkinson sentences that have been pleasing readers since Behind the Scenes at the Museum, doing her very best under the circumstances.

Then she takes a bath, becomes aware in the tub that she is pregnant, recognizes that this is impossible (she is post-menopausal, she has not had sex), and decides - with a practicality the rest of the story will not be able to keep up with - that the explanation must be immaculate conception.

Atkinson's contribution to Amazon's Out of Line short-story series - the same collection that includes Strayed's This Telling, Gay's Graceful Burdens, Ko's The Contractors, Donoghue's Halfway to Free, Kepnes's Sweet Virginia, and Gaitskill's Bear Witness - is the most overtly comic of the seven, and the most divisive. The audiobook (narrated by Gwendoline Christie of Game of Thrones) is one of the more pleasurable hours the collection offers. A 2.5 reflects: a strong, very Atkinson first three-quarters and an ending that I think most readers, including me, found puzzling for reasons I'll get into.

Pamela's Voice, and What the Exclamation Marks Are Doing

The first three-quarters of the story is Atkinson at her dependable best. Pamela's interior voice is brisk, dry, and self-aware in the particular way Atkinson women are self-aware - she knows her dates are terrible, knows her son is a millstone, knows her optimism is increasingly performative, and uses the exclamation marks (Shine, Pamela! Shine!) as armor against admitting any of it. The dating sequences are vintage British comic writing: the men, the small disappointments, the way each disappointment is registered with the same mild, unflinching disappointment Atkinson is good at. The son, who is rendered without affection, is one of the truer pieces of writing about adult-son-still-at-home parents have to live with.

What this part of the story does is convince you that what you are reading is a domestic-comic short story about a woman in late middle age contending with what life has and has not given her. The bath scene reframes everything.

The Bathtub, the Pregnancy, and the Backstory Pamela Will Need

The pregnancy reveal is sudden, surreal, and deliberately unexplained. Pamela has not been with anyone. She is past the age at which this should be possible. She spends real time considering whether she is losing her mind, whether the bath is hallucination, whether some version of immaculate conception is the only available explanation. The practical work of the second half of the story is Pamela trying to construct a backstory - because whatever this is, she will eventually have to tell people about a baby, and the truth (no sex, no explanation, surprise pregnancy in a postmenopausal divorcée) is going to land her, in her own assessment, in either an asylum or a tabloid.

This is where Atkinson is doing interesting work in the abstract. The story is, in Atkinson's later phrase, in the "normal rules don't apply" register that her 2024 short story collection by that title would explicitly take up. Shine, Pamela! Shine! is an early entry in that mode.

The Ending, and the Choice Atkinson Makes That I'm Not Sure About

The story's closing pages are where most readers, looking at the Goodreads averages, came off the train. Skip the rest of this paragraph if you want the ending fresh. The baby, when it is born, has features Pamela reads as ethnic - and her practical solution to the explanation problem is to decide that the backstory will be that she adopted the child from a foreign country. The story stops there. Atkinson does not explain the pregnancy, does not interrogate Pamela's choice, does not particularly contextualize the racial dimension she has just walked the story into. Whether this is a punchline, a satire of how Pamela's specific kind of practicality is exactly the kind that produces uncomfortable choices, or a misjudgment about how the closing image would land on a 2020 reader is - by reader account, including mine - genuinely unclear. I came out of it feeling like Atkinson had set up an absurdist gag and not quite calibrated where it should land.

Why a 2.5

The strengths: Pamela's voice, the dating-comedy texture, Atkinson's reliably good ear for women whose lives have not gone the way they were promised, Gwendoline Christie's audio narration, the early-career version of the absurdist register Atkinson would refine in Normal Rules Don't Apply. The reservations: the third-act swerve is jarring rather than illuminating, the closing image leaves a residue some readers will find pointed and others will find unfortunate, and forty-five pages is not enough room for the absurdist register to earn what Atkinson's novels would have built up to. The Goodreads consensus (around 3.14, with most readers praising the first 75% and disliking the ending) lines up with my own.

A 2.5 here means: I admire Atkinson, I would press Life After Life or Behind the Scenes at the Museum into a new reader's hands first, and Shine, Pamela! Shine! is best read by people who already know they like Atkinson and are curious about her in short-story-experimental mode.

Rating: 2.5/5 ⭐

Perfect for: Kate Atkinson readers, fans of British comic writing about middle age and divorce, listeners who'd hand Gwendoline Christie ninety minutes, readers curious about Atkinson's absurdist short-story register before* Normal Rules Don't Apply.

Skip if: You want short stories that explain themselves, you bounce off absurdist endings without setup, or you're new to Atkinson and would be better served by one of her novels.