Any Moment Together May Be Your Last, and Other Lessons from Sofi Stambo’s “People Who Live Alone Talk Too Much”
Sofi Stambo. People Who Live Alone Talk Too Much. Restless Books, 2026.
If storytelling is our species’ deepest conviviality, Sofi Stambo is one of its most eloquent practitioners. The stories collected in People Who Live Alone Talk Too Much move in the betweenness of immigrant life as experienced by a single woman. Like her narrator, Stambo came to the US from Bulgaria. Like her characters, she experiences language as variations in selfhood, spliced by the challenge of cultural translation.
Bulgaria inches across the heavily-guarded US border in the guise of memories: the shape of fallen chestnut blossoms, the scent of benzene, the sad “Fuck” carved into the wet concrete of a sidewalk, a love for merry-go-rounds and hot dogs, the chatter of pigeons, the black turtleneck-wearing geese who defecate on gravestones. In the small coastal town of Varna, a grandmother beheads several chickens with a machete in the apartment bathroom so her daughter and grandchildren can “devour bone marrow out of a freshly killed chicken” every Sunday. The speaker recognizes the smell of “wet chicken” the same way she does “the sidewalk smells if it rains in the summer in Brooklyn.”
The inflections, syntax, humor, and expressive figurations of the narrative voice remain consistent across the stories, creating the sort of protagonist usually found in long-form fiction. Even as sites of early memory resonate through the material, which centers on adulthood, Stambo’s voice remains defiantly childlike, curiously multi-faceted, in a register where nursery rhymes coexist with miracles, legends, state propaganda, and superstition: no single way of knowing predominates. We are given the bustle of a table being set for company alongside the “sad smile” of a red plastic potty carried by a child who sits and begins “softly farting into it.” Elsewhere, in the “neighborhood known as Hope Number Six,” which happens to be “the last hope” the Bulgarian government ever built, the young speaker’s friends amuse themselves by making games from a string of elastic. Her sentences glisten like well-seasoned quartets, delighting in intimate exposures, accompanied by the whimsical illustrations of Yana Mihaylova, an artist who also happens to be Stambo’s daughter. Mihaylova’s drawings offer an expansion to these stories, as remembered and recollected by another generation of the diaspora.
Stambo opens her collection with a tale about storytelling. In “Spying in Manhattan Diners,” the always-unnamed narrator and her boyfriend spy on the people in a New York diner. As a man recounts a dramatic tale to a customer, the couple analyzes his storytelling in Bulgarian, “which is Greek to everybody, so to speak,” making it their “secret language.” The man performs his cousin’s dramatic death on a city street while the couple studies his form. Is it a Greek tragedy? “He is for sure over the death of his cousin,” the narrator tells us. “Only now do we know that our job here is done and we can leave, like the two angels we are, sent to this earth to keep an eye on the harmony between elements and on the equal distribution of brotherly love, and other types of it, between humans.” Stambo's irreverent writer-angel reflects a loyalty to the spirit of being rather than the laws which permit us to judge it.
“You can learn a lot just by eavesdropping on people’s monologues,” the speaker says in “People Who Live Alone Talk Too Much.” Even in the American office, she is listening, following the patterns of language, tracing the expectations generated by particular verbs in the personal drama of co-workers. By the end, she has “a feeling that someone else” is living her life and using her “lucky letters and numbers.”
The world is incongruently ordered. To this, Stambo appends an alternative life-order carried through apotropaic gestures. In “Go Get ‘Em,” the speaker surveys her parents’ apartment from the perspective of her boyfriends’ very classy parents. She checks the vase of oak leaves for omens and spits three times behind her back, “just in case.”
If you knock on the table’s surface, “whatever evil is lurking underneath will be served to you.” In Bulgaria, only the underside of a wood table gets knocked—not for good luck, but in the curse-repelling apotropaicism that seeks to repulse interference by evil-eyed spirits.
The story, “Just Visiting,” recounts the practices and traditions accorded to posthumous life in Bulgaria. On her way to a Bulgarian cemetery, the speaker purchases six roses—since offering an odd number of flowers to a human in Bulgaria is a curse. (This is true in Romania as well). But in the US, “people don’t care and will give a dozen roses to a loved one.” Wine gets poured over the grave in a cross shape to keep the dead from being thirsty, thus continuing the ancient practice of libation which has largely vanished from the American landscape.
Aromas strike the chord of remembrance, as in the wittily-titled “A House Without a Machete Is Not a House,” which alights from the discovery that Grand Central Station smells exactly like “PS 18, the 18th United Secondary Education Polytechnical School.” The speaker—who resembles someone like Stambo—continues to associate that “rich smell” of fried food in her high school cafeteria with the labor of making knowledge, and the fact that Grand Central and Port Authority share this smell enables her to “pretend nothing much has changed, all places are the same, travel is knowledge and knowledge is power.” Like a magic potion, the “treacherous and nostalgic” smell causes faces from “back home” to appear in the faces nearby. We flash back to the Bulgarian school where the speaker discovered a “kinship” with Asya, an outsider with a snot-filled voice who also knows that the world is bigger than the borders of their nation. The awkward, sniffly Asya would have been the target of vicious gossip and petty bourgeois brattiness at my Alabama public high school, where looks and money determined one’s value. As Stambo’s speaker cultivates Asya’s friendship, I was reminded that kindred spirits are discovered through generosity, affinity and imagination. The cafeteria scene serves a well-deserved thunk on the head to the judgement-heavy lifestyle cults of late capitalism (as well as NYC’s notorious educational hunger games). Stambo’s speaker sits “really close” to Asya, hoping to catch Asya’s cold and the “snotty, deep, raspy voice” that goes with it. Eating in unison models intimacy. She even “fake sniffles in perfect rhythm with her.”
Stambo leverages this queer gesture of fake sniffling to return to the American present, where the speaker plots a possible friendship with an office-peer. By sitting next to Tiffany, Stambo aims to “eat in unison with her,” but Tiffany looks at her phone instead. It is fine to be ignored as long as Tiffany is present, as long as “I can sniff in the rhythm of her sniffing,” writes Stambo. Imitation is how we bond, she suggests. In Bulgaria, she would imitate her father when he recited countries and their capitals: “I discovered that if I found a way to act like another person, even for a minute, that helped me not miss them when they were gone.” The remembered is how we fill the lack.
“I sometimes recite the months while counting them on my fingers to bring my mom closer, to become her, and calm myself,” she adds. As the speaker continues to sniffle while chewing her musaka on the page, she is still “remembering Asya” and honoring her memory. If only Tiffany knew.
Stambo’s playful irreverence enlivens and enchants the banality of modern life. In an ode to Coney Island titled “Or Else?” Stambo notes how she feels at home in the Coney kitsch, surrounded by seagulls and pigeons, the resonance of familiar winged things beating across the borders of countries. In a public restroom papered with posters of Whitney Houston and Amy Winehouse, she gazes around deferentially as if each star in her pop cultural pantheon were an Eastern Orthodox icon. “It feels wrong to go to the bathroom there,” she concludes, “so I pee in the ocean.”
Music, too, is holy, as Stambo reveals in “When I Was a Little Shepherd,” a homage to her grandfather, a promiscuous vocal polyphonist who never met a melody he couldn’t chorus. Love is when “people sing together,” and grandfather Danko is the maestro. Disarmed by harmony, strangers surrender, adding their voices. When the speaker accompanies her grandfather to choir rehearsal, the music travels into her chest “until it vibrates inside me.” She forsakes transcendence only for the occasion of communion, tasting the nafora which must be “made before dawn by a widow or an unwed mother,” a woman designated “clean” from the hands of men. Particular images retain an aura, as when her father steps onto the wet balcony for a smoke and we see the “back of his head framed between two pairs of panties” hanging from the laundry line just before the cigarette gets wet and causes his return in “Go Get ‘Em.”
Objects are marked by the ghosts of their former users, and language bears the traces of those prior markings. Nemski, which means “Germans” in Bulgarian, recurs across separate stories. Like the Romanian word for Germans, nemți, it comes from the Slavic. Russians “called German immigrants nemtzi, meaning “mutes,” because they didn’t speak Russian,” writes Stambo in one story. “We all became nemtzi, living in other people’s lands, dreaming in a foreign language in order to get a decent piece of meat and suck on its bones,” she qualifies in another story. Words continue to mark and shape the idea of Us.
“Lucky People Are Marked” opens directly into an explanation of personal luckiness. “I have a birthmark above my butt, which is undeniable proof that my mother was a thief,” Stambo writes:
My mother’s official story is that while she was pregnant with me (out of wedlock, let the record show), she stole a plum. When they caught her, she hid it behind her back. If a pregnant woman is startled while stealing and then touches her face or body, her baby will have a birthmark in the shape of the stolen thing at the same spot she touched. So pregnant women would throw their hands away from themselves when they stole, or any time something scared them.
This is why she ran away when a pregnant woman crossed her path. “I didn’t want to be near the hands that left marks on everything they touched,” writes Stambo, before throwing us into the terrified reckonings of a young person who touched the large gray electrical box marked with warnings of death. Ultimately, the speaker and her friends face the scary signs “like a bunch of barbarians” with candy guns in their mouths and “no fear whatsoever” in their eyes.
Who but the writer gathers these marks as a testament to her tenderness for the world? Who else plucks a moment in Sofia to honor “a tulip escaping under someone’s fence” eternally?
Recently, Stambo spoke to Admir Skodo on the Migrating Words podcast. Sitting in a bar and studying the way people tell stories causes you to notice, she said, “how many interesting stories just come out of nowhere” simply because “the listeners are around.” Whether in a bar, diner, office, three-room apartment, kinship gets knit in retellings. This is how the legendary uncles of Balkan families are forged. From the kiln of memories, in the humor of mythos, the legendary uncles appear to those who toast them in absentia.
Longing occurs in language, in the expressive bond between words. Her grandparents only refer to Varna as “beautiful Varna,” marking the place with tenderness because it is “the one we all left.”
Eventually, immigrants who live in the US begin picking the fleas from their culture of origin: the shared nakedness of baths seems like abuse, poverty resembles neglect, and domestic conflict gets labelled a traumatic childhood. How many of us inventory our parents’ faux-pas as a rite of passage into Americanism? It is to Stambo’s credit that she resists this assimilationist urge to perform American exceptionalism. Refusing to judge Bulgaria by American standards, she draws us into the noise and chaos of “the barbarian house” with its “yellers and yellees,” the operatic arguments winding between her parents in a language with no word for “privacy” or “customer service.” She calls them “my family of weirdos”—and lists them by name in a lengthy dedication column under the heading “to my grand people.”
“Two million and eight hundred of us,” Stambo says of Bulgarian immigrants in her final story. US media often depicts immigrants as parasites or grifters who come to suck milk from the generous public teat of the American dream. But the public teat seems alarmingly unavailable, even to its born-here citizens. Neoliberalism leverages scarcity-based xenophobia by stoking resentment against “foreigners.”
On Migrating Words, Stambo said people usually immigrate for reasons of hardship. They land “where history drops them,” at which point they “either get rooted there or they fail.” Many fail, she said. Many get sick; some die; some go back. “It is a very sad movement,” she added, “it’s not an American dream pursuit situation.”
There are so many phantoms among the trails blazed; there are the paths not taken. “My father got psoriasis when my brother, my husband, my daughter, and I left for America,” Stambo writes in “Denim.” And the dog licks his hands “therapeutically” as the father begs his family to come back to Bulgaria.
My mother’s father never forgave her for leaving Romania, abandoning her family, language, history, and ancestors. In all the years of my childhood, long after the fall of the Berlin wall, the man my mother adored never once came to the US to visit her—or her children. We laugh because life never stops ripping us a new one. And we write because we are insatiably fascinated by this unfathomable thing called “life.”
Grace Paley once said we write to “explain it all” to ourselves, and the less we understand, the more we write. We take our “ununderstanding, whatever it is” and “simply never get over it.” A writer is “like an idealist who marries nearly the same woman over and over,” Paley continued. “He tries to write with different names and faces, using different professions and labors, other forms to travel the shortest distance to the way things really are.”
A writer like Sofi Stambo cannot help it. She “can almost hear the multilingual silence” moving between painters who are thinking in seven different languages—and she wants you to hear it as well. When asked by an interviewer to locate whether one of her stories came from “imagination or experience,” Stambo probably smiled. “Where do they all come from?” she replied, adding a note of gratitude for their presence. As for their origins, the story came from a “place or state of mind similar to the one you are in when you are in love.” It is a “nice place,” she added, “even if unreal.” It is the homeland known as life.
