The short story “A simple exchange of Niceties” written by Joanne Fedler in 2007, is about a young woman who accidentally becomes pregnant, and therefore loses her boyfriend. The young woman has a special relationship to a bench, were she one day meets a woman. They starting to talk, and the young woman find out, that the woman is infertile. She decides to give the woman her baby, but when the woman never come back she keeps it, and think of it as her destiny.
The story is written in spoken language and is written in present.
The story is written in first-person narrator, you hear everything she thinks, sees and feels. But you never get to know the name or age of the narrator. You get the impression of her as a shy, unsecure woman who keeps things to herself. She puts up a mask of a “hard core” person she hides behind. She tries to act like she does not care, when people call her “trashy” and “a whore”, but she gets hurt, and starts to believe that she is worthless. She suffers from bad self-esteem and are not very good at socializing with other people. The narrator thinks of herself as a person who has not achieved much in life, even though she sees herself as a giving person. She does not mind sharing material things, “i’d give anyone the shirt off my back, or the food of my plate” (p.1. line. 24.), but when it comes to intimacy, like the bench, her feelings and thoughts, she is unable to share, and through the story she express her feelings through what other people has said or done. Like when she use her best friend Barbie’s expressions or things she has said, to explain how she feels in a current situation, like in the line “Clueless, as Barbie would say rolling her eyes”(p.2. line. 72). She also sees herself as “the adverse child”, as she tells the lady, she feel like nobody wants her. The narrator thinks that other people are classier than her, like in the