I was heading home from my girlfriend’s house and it was taking a while. She lived well south of San Francisco and it was a weekend so the trains weren’t running. Instead you had to go to the station and a take a bus but the bus didn’t stop at every station and I had been at the wrong depot so I had to take a bus just to get to the place where I caught the bus and that bus didn’t come for half an hour so I sat on the long pews with the other passengers and waited for my ride home.
I only saw my girlfriend maybe once a week because she lived so far away and when I saw her I was stuck there for 24 or 16 hours. But maybe stuck isn’t the right word. I was only happy when I was with her but she was so difficult, so intense, that once a week seemed …show more content…
In “I Want To Live” we meet Mrs. Wilson just as she is finding out she has cancer. It seems, on the face of it, a terrible idea for a story. Like it’s almost too easy to be good, a story about a woman who gets cancer and dies. But somehow Thom Jones pulls it off with perfect, beautiful minimalism. We rise with her highs and lows, though the dilaudid and the pain. We get brief, unexplained glimpses of her estranged daughter, her good for nothing son-in-law who turns out to be the unexpected hero when given a chance. Jones holds nothing back, guiding us through all of Mrs. Wilson’s small, terrible …show more content…
Not on a personal level; a person should strive to be happy. But in a story happiness was irrelevant. People work too hard to make their fiction funny. There’s nothing wrong with funny but it’s not what matters. The most important thing fiction can do is teach the truth, illuminate something that couldn’t be discovered in any other way. I stopped thinking of ways to make Happy Baby funnier and more accessible. I cut every adjective, removed all traces of backstory. I wasn’t going to explain the unnecessary. I was writing a book about a man who equated abuse with affection. I was exploring, through fiction, how that could happen and where that might come from. I wanted my reader to understand this condition and I wanted to understand it myself. I will never write anything as good as “I Want To Live” (which was in the Best American Short Stories that year as well as the Best American Short Stories of the Century) but that doesn’t mean I’m not going to strive toward its
I only saw my girlfriend maybe once a week because she lived so far away and when I saw her I was stuck there for 24 or 16 hours. But maybe stuck isn’t the right word. I was only happy when I was with her but she was so difficult, so intense, that once a week seemed …show more content…
In “I Want To Live” we meet Mrs. Wilson just as she is finding out she has cancer. It seems, on the face of it, a terrible idea for a story. Like it’s almost too easy to be good, a story about a woman who gets cancer and dies. But somehow Thom Jones pulls it off with perfect, beautiful minimalism. We rise with her highs and lows, though the dilaudid and the pain. We get brief, unexplained glimpses of her estranged daughter, her good for nothing son-in-law who turns out to be the unexpected hero when given a chance. Jones holds nothing back, guiding us through all of Mrs. Wilson’s small, terrible …show more content…
Not on a personal level; a person should strive to be happy. But in a story happiness was irrelevant. People work too hard to make their fiction funny. There’s nothing wrong with funny but it’s not what matters. The most important thing fiction can do is teach the truth, illuminate something that couldn’t be discovered in any other way. I stopped thinking of ways to make Happy Baby funnier and more accessible. I cut every adjective, removed all traces of backstory. I wasn’t going to explain the unnecessary. I was writing a book about a man who equated abuse with affection. I was exploring, through fiction, how that could happen and where that might come from. I wanted my reader to understand this condition and I wanted to understand it myself. I will never write anything as good as “I Want To Live” (which was in the Best American Short Stories that year as well as the Best American Short Stories of the Century) but that doesn’t mean I’m not going to strive toward its