“No one was coming toward the house yet, but things wouldn’t stay the way they were much longer.”

Beattie croppedWhen Ann Beattie met John Updike, he said “You figured out how to write an entirely different kind of story.” Her stories were “the” stories my English department discussed in the 1980s because they were so  revolutionary.  T. Coraghessan Boyle wrote in the New York Times, “Her stories are propelled not so much by event as by the accumulation of the details that build a life…” This is hard to do well.  Almost everyone I knew during those years, including me, tried to write Beattiesque stories that had a beginning, a middle, and an epiphany that substituted for an ending.

Ann Beattie. The New Yorker Stories (New York: Scribner, 2010), 305.



This entry was posted in fiction and tagged , , , . Bookmark the permalink.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.