Diminished

Polly assumes that her family is no different than others, but she may be wrong. Doesn't everyone have a grandfather with a mistress he kept hidden until his funeral? A close family friend who runs an insider trading operation out of the neighborhood thrift shop? Didn't she herself arrive at labor and delivery in a rickshaw? And inadvertently engage in a tryst with some swingers in the name of saving her marriage? Diminished is a collection of linked short stories spanning four generations in a family's history. Each story speaks to a pivotal event in one family member's life-childbirth, death, marriage-the milestones that define us all. Each story stands alone, but is stronger read together. As the family's boundaries broaden from the Bronx to Honolulu, Polly learns that the only thing that binds her family, any family, from diminishing can be as simple as choice.