Smiley, Jane. The Age of Grief. New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1987.
A collection of short stories. Instead of summarizing them I have decided to quote my favorite lines instead because there was one from every story.
- Pleasure of her company~ “I felt like your child or your sister or something” (p 25).
- Lily~ “Love was like an activity, you had to put in the hours” (p 33).
- Jeffrey, Believe Me~ “Who can tell the lifelong effect of a cacophonous conception” (p 60), and “you would indeed be spending the night but in a near coma” (p 64).
- Long Distance~ “Can a melancholy sound have a quality of desperation?” (p 71)
- Dynamite~ “When they would ask me, I was fine, too, but I had the excuse of making bombs, something, I told myself, they didn’t want to know (p 96).
- And finally, the novella, The Age of Grief~ I couldn’t find one or two quotesI liked best -too many to mention so I won’t mention at all; and I can’t tell you what I think of this final story. A dentist and his wife (also a dentist) go through the ups and downs of marriage & parenting. It’s haunting because I can’t imagine this kind of grief.
BookLust Twist: From More Book Lust in the chapter “Big Ten Country: The Literary Midwest (Iowa)” (p 26).
~*LunaSea*~ 