Looking for Trouble

You could breathe in Yeoville. Set in vibrant, edgy Yeoville during late 1980s, early 1990s Johannesburg, the stories in Looking for Trouble capture a moment when everything in South Africa was about to change. Colleen Higgs presents love stories without sentiment, relationships explored through the small, broken things that reveal everything. In "Plumbing: A Short History," a woman recounts her relationships through the metaphor of the dripping faucet that all the men in her life tried to fix. In "Looking for Trouble," the collection's signature story, a woman recounts the unraveling of her situationship that ultimately leads to violence and to her question about how she arrived there. These intimate portraits explore the complexities of urban life in a grey area, both literally and figuratively, where filmmakers, musicians, and activists mingle in flats with faulty plumbing and hearts full of longing. With sharp wit and brutal honesty, Higgs reveals the gap between how we imagine our lives and how we actually live them. In a time and place where everyone you sleep with has slept with someone you know, these stories examine the particular intensity of being young when the personal and political intersect. Looking for Trouble is both a love letter to a vanished Johannesburg and a clear-eyed examination of being human.