Table Of ContentSex,Race,and Family in
Contemporary American
Short Stories
American Literature Readings in the 21stCentury
Series Editor: Linda Wagner-Martin
American Literature Readings in the 21stCenturypublishes works
by contemporary critics that help shape critical opinion regarding
literature of the nineteenth and twentieth century in the United
States.
Published by Palgrave Macmillan:
Freak Shows in Modern American Imagination: Constructing the Damaged Body
from Willa Cather to Truman Capote
By Thomas Fahy
Arab American Literary Fictions, Cultures, and Politics
By Steven Salaita
Women & Race in Contemporary U.S. Writing: From Faulkner to Morrison
By Kelly Lynch Reames
American Political Poetry in the 21st Century
By Michael Dowdy
Science and Technology in the Age of Hawthorne, Melville, Twain, and James:
Thinking and Writing Electricity
By Sam Halliday
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Racial Angles and the Business of Literary Greatness
By Michael Nowlin
Sex, Race, and Family in Contemporary American Short Stories
By Melissa Bostrom
Sex, Race, and Family in
Contemporary American Short
Stories
Melissa Bostrom
SEX,RACE,ANDFAMILYINCONTEMPORARYAMERICANSHORTSTORIES
Copyright © Melissa Bostrom,2007.
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2007 978-1-4039-7990-2
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First published in 2007 by
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Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction 1
1. Story 9
2. The Female Sexual Economy 43
3. Economies of Whiteness 83
4. Economies 131
Notes 157
Works Cited 197
Index 217
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Acknowledgments
The story of this book has been long, and the help I have received has
overflowed the bounds of any economy. I thank the many readers
who graciously provided feedback at many stages: María DeGuzmán,
Linda Wagner-Martin, John McGowan, Laurie Langbauer, Marianne
Gingher, Jane Burns, and Bob Johnstone, with a special debt to Tara
Powell and Andy Leiter. Thanks to Farideh Koohi-Kamali and
Elizabeth Sabo at Palgrave Macmillan for guiding the book, and
thanks to Maran Elancheran at Newgen for its design. Funding from
UNC’s Department of English and Royster Society supported the
project at critical junctures.
I have been lucky to have a substantial cheering section of friends
behind me: Kim Burton-Oakes, Berenice Cadena Patiño, Mary
Cunningham, Brian Dietz, Adam Garratt, Jessica Kem Gorman, Tom
Gorman, Jennifer Haytock, Chris Hill, Sharon Joffe, Ann Kakaliouras,
Alex McAulay, Lisa McAulay, Fiona Mills, Joy Salyers, Courtney Sears,
Cindy Stone, Elaine Tola, Rich Zink, and, above all, Sarah Mazer Zink.
I especially thank my family for lifting my spirits across the miles—my
parents, Dave and Kay; my siblings, Lynn and Ben; and my extended
family, Andrea Grotenhuis, Todd Grotenhuis, Brian Nowling, Cara
Nowling, Paula Nowling, Jo Wier, Jeff Wier, Katie Wier, and Peg Wier.
My grandfather, Bob Wier, supported me throughout the work of this
project, and we’ll all miss him in celebrating its end.
Finally, I would need to write another book to adequately express
my gratitude to Krisztian Horvath, whose kindness, sense of humor,
intellect, and love have made the journey worthwhile.
Introduction
In the widely acclaimed story “People Like That Are the Only People
Here,” Lorrie Moore relates the tale of a Mother and a Husband
whose Baby has been diagnosed with renal cancer.1 The story opens
with the Mother’s discovery of a blood clot in the Baby’s diaper and
follows the family through his treatment. Moore’s story is not a
run-of-the-mill family drama, though. The first words the Husband
utters in the story follow the Mother’s announcement of the Baby’s
diagnosis; his first reaction is to suggest, “Take notes.” Because his
wife is a novelist and teacher, he repeats, “Take notes. We are going to
need the money” (219). When the Mother, appalled, tells him,
“Iwrite fiction. This isn’t fiction,” he recommends that she write their
story as a journalistic report. “Get two dollars a word,” he suggests
(222). In response to the news that their infant son will need a
nephrectomy and chemotherapy at the least, and perhaps the removal
of the other kidney and a transplant as well, the Husband immediately
focuses on ways to turn this situation into one that is profitable rather
than financially draining. Although the Mother resists his advice
throughout the story, steadfastly refusing to profit from her Baby’s
life-threatening illness, she seems to recover from those qualms by the
end of the story, when the Baby’s cancer has faded into remission.
“There are the notes,” she writes on the final page. “Now where is the
money?” (250).
Moore foregrounds the relationship between the short story and
economics here in a way few other writers have done. The Mother’s
choice to tell the story for money underlines the relationship between
writers of short stories and the kind of financial gain they can bring.
Originally published in the New Yorker—currently the most promi-
nent U.S. magazine printing literary short fiction—this story is par-
ticularly important because it was widely anthologized, including in
the 1998 volume of the Best American Short Stories series and as the
first-prize winner of the O. Henry Awards for that same year. Charles
McGrath, the former fiction editor of the New Yorker, has speculated
that this “knockout” story propelled Moore’s collection Birds of
M. Bostrom, Sex, Race, and Family in Contemporary American Short Stories
© Melissa Bostrom 2007
2 SEX,RACE,AND FAMILY
Americato the New York Timesbestseller list, a rare feat for any short
story collection. The story thus reached a wide audience—wider, per-
haps, than almost any other piece of literary short fiction published in
the past decade (“The Short Story” E1).2 The narrative voice of the
story, that of the (unnamed) Mother, also sparked speculation by
readers and critics that the events related in the story were inspired by
Moore’s own life. The story’s initial appearance in the New Yorkerfed
such conjecture through the contents page, which implied that the
piece was a memoir; the first page of the story itself was printed oppo-
site a photograph of Moore (Passaro 83–84). Moore herself was
rather coy about the truth of that assumption; her “Contributors’
Notes” accompanying the story’s publication in the 1998 Best
American Short Stories volume say simply, “This story has a relation-
ship to real life like that of a coin to a head. It is dedicated to my son”
(291). Even her simile invokes economic terms to explain the story’s
relation to reality.
Although Moore’s story portrays a contemporary example, American
women have been writing stories about their families to support them
for many decades. The earliest women short story writers in this country
turned to the short story after attempting genres such as Sunday School
literature, child-rearing and etiquette advice, children’s literature, and
even the more traditional essays, novels, and poetry (Koppelman, “A
Preliminary Sketch” 1). Financially, they found short stories to be the
best option for supporting themselves; stories simply sold better and
paid more. As Mary Louise Pratt has noted, the story genre is partic-
ularly friendly to writers who are new to the literary scene, such as
women and minorities, in a way that most other traditional genres are
not, allowing a number of new writers to find remuneration and
recognition as they launch their careers. Moore herself has remarked
that this fact about the story is good for both readers and writers: to
have art forms “newly open to people who wouldn’t ordinarily have
the economic means to write them, is not a bad thing. It allows for
voices, and pieces of the world, and life coming into light and play
that readers didn’t have before” (McGraw, Moore, and Burgin 26).
Moreover, as Virginia Woolf observed in A Room of One’s Own,
shorter forms are better suited to women writers, who can constantly
be interrupted in their domestic and childcare duties, and fiction
requires less concentrated attention than either drama or poetry
(Woolf 78, 66). Even contemporary writers find truth in this state-
ment. Sue Miller, in her introduction to the 2002 Best American
Short Stories volume, explains that Woolf’s dictum held true in her
own life: “I wound up writing short stories,” she recounts, “because
