Ordinary sins (thesis)

Abstract

Ordinary Sins is a collection of eight connected short stories, following the creation and the demise of a nuclear family. . . . Ultimately, I hope to capture what I think is a central facet of human behavior: For the most part, the world is filled with people doing their best to do the right thing, though no one really knows what the "right thing" actually is. The title Ordinary Sins comes from a line in the opening story, "Only he believed that his sins of ordinariness could be undone." I chose the phrase as the title of the collection to suggest that, while life is full of catastrophic events which can ruin relationships, often when a family disintegrates it is no one's fault, that the "sins" committed in relationships are often ordinary, commonplace mistakes and miscalculations that no one intends to be destructive. The word "sins" has no religious intentions, but rather illuminates the gravity these characters perceive in their every day actions. (From the Introductory Essay]