Someone Should Know This Story (excerpt)

“‘Someone Should Know This Story’ is both the name of this book and the wish of my heart,” writes Merrill Joan Gerber in the introduction to her retrospective collection of twenty-five stories written over a period of four decades, many of which appeared in widely read periodicals such as The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Redbook, and Mademoiselle. The following excerpt is the title story of this collection, Someone Should Know This Story, which released from Sagging Meniscus Press earlier this year.

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I had no interest at all in spending the weekend with Carolyn, especially on such short notice, and also because Carolyn communicated most of her ideas to me by pushing, shoving, and jolting me about.

She was not really a friend of mine, but a girl of fourteen, my own age, who happened to be the daughter of my Aunt Ava, who was not really an aunt of mine, but the wife of a man who once asked my mother to marry him when he was just out of law school and she was a legal secretary in a firm where he applied for a job.

I could tell my mother wanted me to accept Ava’s spur-of-the-moment invitation—it had something to do with being very civilized about her relationship with Ava, and it seemed important to Ava, too, that I “dump my nightie and a toothbrush in a bag and come right along.”

Ava had driven into Brooklyn to visit her old mother who was in a rest home on Ocean Parkway, and she had dropped in to see us “for old times’ sake.” When she arrived, my mother had just come up from the basement with a heavy wicker basket full of wet laundry. By the time I had led Ava and Carolyn through the length of the house to the back porch, my mother was already leaning out over the railing, pushing the clothesline across the yard. They talked over the squeaking of the pulley.

Although I rarely liked to help with the wash (it was only in the winter I enjoyed being there when it was pulled in, every shirt and pajama frozen stiff by the cold), I stood beside my mother and shook out towels, getting them ready to hand to her with two clothespins for hanging.

“We send our clothes out to the laundry,” Carolyn said, poking me fiercely in the ribs and laughing. She had buck teeth, but even so she was attractive because she had large breasts and a small waist like her mother, and brilliant straight dark black hair. Ava wore her black hair pulled back in a perfect chignon, with a string of colored stones woven somehow through the bun.

My mother’s short wavy hair was nearly white—even though she was only in her early forties, she was often taken by my schoolfriends to be my grandmother—and I experienced a queer loyalty toward her just then, as she stood pushing the clothesline across the yard, wearing flat straw shoes and a seersucker housedress.

Ava wore high-heeled pumps and carried a shoulder bag made out of a whole alligator—I could count the teeth in the alligator’s mouth as she stood talking to my mother.

“Herbert would be so pleased to have Janet stay with us. He’s so fond of her.”

I liked Herbert very much myself, but it was a feeling I never mentioned. Years before, he had come to our house on the pretext of some legal service he was doing for my grandmother, and he had seen me standing in the doorway beside my mother. As if I were not present, he said to her, sadly, “You know, Anna, she could have been mine.”

“Why don’t you go, Janet?” my mother asked me. “It will be a nice change.”

I thought about my plans for the weekend: on Saturday I was going to take my grandmother to the movies, where we would get another flowered china cup to add to our growing set of dishes, and on Sunday several of my friends were going to come over to play canasta on the back porch. I looked about the backyard, where my dog was sleeping in his doghouse, where the lilacs were just starting to bud on the tree, where my little sister was sitting on the grass, coloring in her coloring book, and I thought of spending a weekend being shoved about by Carolyn.

“I can’t go,” I said. “My piano recital is June 10th, and I have to practice.”

“Nonsense,” Ava said. “We have the Steinway and no one ever touches it. Carolyn took lessons for six weeks and that was the end of that. We’ll close you in the living room whenever you want to practice and you’ll have perfect privacy.”

If my father had been home he would have helped me out of it. He had no use for this occasional but continuing friendship with Herbert and Ava, and took no part in it. He considered Herbert to be a weak, scrawny asthmatic, and as far as reckoning with the visibly great material rewards Herbert lavished on his family as a result of his education, ambition, and successful legal practice—well, my mother had always been a free agent, and could have married anyone she chose. My father, who dealt in antiques, was not about to bow his head in shame.

I packed my clothes, and the blue sheet-music edition of “Claire de Lune,” and drove back to Manhattan with Carolyn and Ava, my eyes tearing all the while from the smoke of Ava’s cigarette filling the interior of the black Buick.

I was introduced first to the doorman and then to the elevator man. Several women with packages were coming into the building just then, and we were packed against the walls of the elevator with hardly room to breathe. No one said hello to Ava, and she stared ahead haughtily, taller than anyone in the car.

As soon as we got into the carpeted hallway of the sixth floor, I noticed the absence of air. It was springtime and there was no air on Park Avenue. No backyard, no grass, no flowers, no pets. How did they live here?

But in a moment I saw there were cut flowers in a silver vase on the dining room table, and I was shown the house pet from a distance: “His name is Malachi, and he will not hurt you unless he is provoked.” Ava smiled briefly at me, and went down the hall into her bedroom.

“What provokes him?” I asked Carolyn. The dog was a huge, unattractive collie; he lay under the piano, staring at us and breathing heavily.

“Just don’t go near him,” Carolyn said, punching my shoulder for emphasis. “Come on, follow me.”

In the kitchen I met Suellen, a black woman who scowled at Carolyn and said, “Don’t you ask me what’s for dinner. Whatever it is, it’ll have to suit you.”

“What’s that?” I asked, pointing at a machine screwed into the wall.

“An ice crusher,” Carolyn said. “Don’t you have one?”

“No, we don’t.” I felt suddenly very frightened and trapped. There was nothing here I wanted to do, no one I wanted to be with or even liked. Herbert was kind, but I knew he would have very little to do with me.

I considered for a moment phoning my father at his store, and begging him to come and get me. I knew he would—he would come in an instant. But just the thought of him calmed me; the way he loved me was so tremendous that I could survive anything as long as I remembered him. My mother sometimes said she thought she had been destined for some other life, with a man of breeding, education, money. Of all her boyfriends, most of whom had been young lawyers, only my father was working in the pajama department of Loeser’s when she met him. It never occurred to me to ask her why she actually married him, a man with an eighth-grade education, since it seemed obvious to me he would have been the best possible choice in the world—for anyone.

And yet, sometimes I saw her watching him work with his huge powerful hands, with dirt that was as permanent as his skin embedded under his nails, watching him move some heavy oak chifforobe he had just bought, his face red with the strain of the labor (once he cracked two ribs and did not know it for days), or watching him peer through a loupe at pieces of old jewelry he kept in a cigar box—and I saw on her face a certain distance, maybe distaste or self-pity, maybe regret that she had come to spend her days with a man who had never read Shakespeare’s sonnets. I knew that in our bookcase we had the sonnets, given to my mother by Herbert, and inscribed by him to her. If my father had seen it there, or minded it, I never knew.

Ava came out of her bedroom, dressed in a long silk robe, and went down the hall into another room. Even though this was an apartment, it seemed to have more rooms than our whole house did. There were antiques on all the polished surfaces of the furniture, and I could tell they existed here in a different sense than did the ones in my father’s store. Here they were works of art, carefully dusted and displayed, while in my father’s shop antiques were piece goods, merchandise, to be traded and sold, with profit the only goal in mind. In our own home we had no antiques. My mother could not stand them. To her they were just “old things” that belonged to “other people.”

Carolyn threw her arms around me and bear-hugged me from behind. I gasped, and stood trying to catch my breath. “I just can’t believe you’re here,” she said. She dragged me by the hand to where her mother was in a little alcove, talking on the phone. “Get bonbons,” she whispered, and her mother made an impatient gesture with her hand for Carolyn to be quiet. Ava was ordering cuts of beef, fruit, vegetables, rolls and pastries.

“If your mother shops on the phone,” I asked Carolyn in a whisper, “how can she be certain they won’t send her rotten tomatoes and bad meat?”

“Simple,” Carolyn said, so sure of herself. “We’d never call that grocer again.”

I thought of the way my mother shopped, pushing our old black-wicker baby stroller to the Avenue, stopping at each store to stand in line—the fish market, the bakery, the drugstore, the delicatessen. And what exactly were bonbons?

When Herbert came home he was carrying a sheaf of papers. He saw me sitting on the couch and smiled gently at me. “Is your mother here?” he asked softly, eyebrows raised.

“No. Aunt Ava was in Brooklyn today, and she brought me back to spend the night.”

“Oh, Brooklyn, yes,” Herbert said. He wheezed badly. He wore glasses and was going bald.

“Ava?” he called. He looked at Carolyn. “She’s not in with Ravi, is she?”

“Of course not,” Carolyn said. Something hard passed between them. “She’s steaming her face.” When her father had gone down the hall to his room, Carolyn mumbled, “She’s not a fool, you know.”

When we were all seated around the dinner table, Ava rang a silver bell and the maid came in with the first course. Dinner took a very long time, and there was no conversation. After each course was finished, Ava rang the bell and the maid appeared. Everyone seemed quite miserable, waiting and waiting while each place was cleared and the next dish brought. Finally Herbert cleared his throat and said, “Well, Janet, how do you like it in this neck of the woods?”

“It’s fine, Uncle Herbert,” I said. “It’s very interesting.”

After dessert I asked Carolyn which room was the bathroom. She pointed down the hall, and when I opened the door I thought she meant, I saw a dark young man sitting at a desk, wearing a turban on his head.

He stood up slowly. “How do you do?” he said with great significance. His teeth were brilliantly white in his dark face, and I experienced a kind of thrill that I had never felt before. He was evaluating me as if I were a grown woman.

“Excuse me,” I said. “I didn’t mean to open your door. I didn’t know anyone else lived here.”

“They try to keep it a secret,” he said, with some soft laughter. “It would be embarrassing for anyone to know they were down on their luck and had to take in a boarder.”

I knew I could not stand in the doorway and engage in conversation. “Pardon me,” I said again, “I’m sorry,” and I backed out quickly and closed the door. I was breathless when I came back into the dining room; I was reminded of the days, not so long ago, when I used to read Nancy Drew mystery stories, in which just such discoveries were commonplace.

“Why don’t you two girls do something?” Ava suggested. “What do you do with your friends at home, Janet?”

“We like to play canasta,” I said.

Ava said, “Carolyn has a nice puppet collection in her room. Why don’t you both go in there and play for a while?”

In the morning when I awoke, Carolyn was not in her bed. I put on my skirt and blouse and went down the hall to the kitchen. Suellen said to me, “She has a riding lesson every Sunday morning. She said she forgot to tell you, but she’ll be back by noon. The riding school comes and gets her at 8:30, and she didn’t want to wake you. She said you should wait for her and practice the piano.”

“Where is my aunt?”

“Asleep. But she’s got a lady coming here in a little while, and we got to clear the kitchen. What do you like to eat? There’s some French toast left.”

She served it to me covered with maple syrup; at home my mother sprinkled a little sugar and cinnamon on it, and that was the way I liked it. I had never realized that life for other people could be so different in so many ways.

As I passed down the hall I could hear Herbert wheezing in his room. I heard the whoosh-whoosh of his rubber atomizer. I got “Claire de Lune” from my suitcase and went into the living room, where the dog was lying under the piano. He growled softly as I pulled out the bench. I hoped that French piano music would not provoke him.

I practiced for at least an hour, for the first time really happy to have a reason to work out the hardest passages. I simply could think of nothing as acceptable to pass the time as playing my music. I hoped that at least one good result of this visit would be that I might do nicely at my recital.

I wondered when they were going to take me home. Since no one talked very much here, I felt it would be impolite to ask anything outright. I had had trouble sleeping, and my stomach hurt during the night. I considered trying to find the bathroom in the dark, but I wasn’t absolutely sure which room belonged to the dark young man, and I couldn’t take a chance. Just before we went to bed, I had asked Carolyn about him.

“Oh, Ravi,” she said. “He’s an Indian prince or something. He’s a student at the university and he lives with us because we have so much extra room. My father hates him, but my mother likes him.”

“Do you like him?”

“It doesn’t matter,” she answered. “He has no use for me.”

When I was through practicing I went into the kitchen for a glass of water. Ava was lying naked on a towel on the kitchen table, and a woman was slapping her back with both hands. I stood in the doorway watching. The woman, who was dressed in a white uniform just like Suellen, hit Ava’s back with the sides of her hands, and then the flat of them. The smacks were hard enough for me to hear. There were bottles of lotions and powders on the counter. Ava’s head, wrapped in a towel, rested on her arms. Her eyes were closed.

I went quickly down the hall past Herbert’s bedroom, where he was wheezing more loudly than before. I didn’t know where to go—in the living room was the unfriendly dog, the maid had disappeared, and at the end of the hall was the Indian prince. There was no outside to go to, and Carolyn had no books of the kind I liked to read. Her parents seemed to buy her only games and books that were suitable for an eight-year-old.

The door at the end of the hall opened suddenly and the prince came out. “Good morning,” he said, bowing. “May I ask if you are a cousin of the family’s?”

“I’m not related,” I said. “My mother once almost married Carolyn’s father, but I don’t think that makes me anything here.”

“What a shame,” he said.

“That I’m not related?”

“That Herbert didn’t marry your mother. No doubt he could have been a much happier man.” “How do you know?” I asked.

“I live here, my dear,” he said, smiling. We stood very close together in the hall. He must have been on his way out, for he was holding a briefcase in his hand.

“That is a strange noise,” he said. We could hear the slaps resounding down the hall.

“My aunt has some woman … working on her in the kitchen.”

“On Sunday?” the prince said. “How unusual.” He set his briefcase down on the floor. “I won’t go out after all,” he said.

He remained there, looking at me and smiling. My heart pounded. I thought of the puppets, which suddenly seemed something attractive I wanted to play with.

“You have extraordinary blue eyes,” the prince said. “You also play the piano with dedication. One day you will be an interesting and beautiful woman.”

“Excuse me,” I said. I turned around and rushed to Herbert’s door. I knocked on it.

“Come in,” he said. He was in an armchair by the window, reading the newspaper. On the table beside him were his atomizer, his medicine, and a cup of coffee.

“Do you think you could take me home early, Uncle Herbert?” I asked him. “I’m really not feeling very well.”

“I think Ava was planning to take you home this afternoon,” he said.

“But couldn’t you? Now?”

“Let me tell you the truth about this, Janet. Ava doesn’t like me to see your mother very much. You know, in the old days I was very fond of your mother, and Ava is still jealous.”

I wondered if I should tell him that I thought my father was also jealous of him.

Herbert said, “I wonder—do you know that I once asked your mother to marry me?”

“Yes, of course I know that.”

“Do you know the circumstances? Did she ever tell you about it? How we went to a Chinese restaurant that night?”

I shook my head.

“Someone should know this story,” he said.

I sat down.

“We’d been going out for a long time. Your mother was not a passionate person, it was never easy to know her feelings. We went to plays and concerts and she seemed to enjoy my company. Your grandmother liked me a great deal—in fact, I think she even began to love me like a son—and I was very optimistic. I bought your mother a diamond engagement ring. We went to dinner that night, and when she reached for a fortune cookie, I stopped her hand and said, ‘Here, your future is in this little box.’ She looked at the ring and she refused it. I insisted she take it, that it was for her and that I didn’t want it back even if she didn’t accept my proposal. She handed it to me, and I handed it back to her, and finally she just dropped it on the table. When we got up to leave, we each thought the other would feel he must go back and get it, but neither of us did. We left it on the white tablecloth.”

“Forever?” I asked.

“Forever.”

“My mother has no diamond rings now,” I told Herbert.

He finished his coffee and then said he would check with Ava about taking me home. I followed him down the hall. Ava was no longer lying naked on the kitchen table. The woman in white was packing up her bottles of lotions and powders. The sound of Ava’s laughter came from the prince’s room.

“Come! Come!” Herbert said suddenly. “I‘ll take you home. Quickly … get your things.’’

I didn’t wait to say good-bye to Carolyn, nor did I ever thank Ava. Herbert drove me all the way back to Brooklyn without speaking to me. He wasn’t angry or distant, he was just thoughtful, and I began to relax and let my guard down. I put my head back against the seat and almost fell asleep.

When we pulled up to my house, no one was in the front garden, but my dog was asleep under the beach chair and my father’s pipe rested on its wooden arm. Just then my mother came to the front door to shake out the dry mop, and she saw us. She smiled and waved. Her white hair shone in the sun.

Herbert and I got out of the car, and he carried my small suitcase to the bottom of the front stoop. He looked up at my mother, who stood on the top step.

“Daddy’s in the backyard,” she said to me quickly. “Run around to the back and tell him Herbert’s here and to come and say hello.”

I skipped up the alley and burst into the backyard, and into my father’s arms. He hugged me so hard I almost cried. He was bare to the waist, cutting dead branches off the peach tree. Drops of sweat ran down through the curls of dark hair on his chest.

“Mommy says to come and say hello to Herbert.”

I pulled my father forward by the hand; he came slowly, letting me drag him toward the front of the house.

My mother had come down from the steps and was standing close beside Herbert. She seemed to stop talking suddenly as we came into view, and Herbert extended his hand to my father.

“You have no idea what a great pleasure it was to have your daughter with us this weekend.”

My father shook Herbert’s hand briefly, and my mother swayed to and fro, leaning on the pole of her dry mop. Herbert, hot and nervous in his tweed suit-jacket, shifted from one foot to another, saying his awkward good-byes. My father, who had bits of leaves and twigs in his thick black hair, looked around the yard, taking stock of the gardening he still needed to do. I saw that while I had been away, the popcorn-ball bush had bloomed into color.

When Herbert had driven off, my mother kissed me on the forehead and took my suitcase inside. I followed my father up the alley into the backyard and sat on the swing while he clipped branches off the peach tree with the rusted shears. My dog ran in circles around the yard like a maniac.

Once my father paused and looked over his shoulder at me.

“Glad to be home?”

In answer, I began to swing, grinning, and he stopped what he was doing to give me a magnificent push skyward.

Excerpt from Someone Should Know This Story published with permission from Sagging Meniscus Press. This story was originally published in Honeymoon (University of Illinois Press, 1985).

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An Interview with Merrill Joan Gerber by Michelle Ross

Merril Joan Gerber is the author of over thirty books. Among her novels are The Kingdom of Brooklyn, winner of the Ribalow Award from Hadassah Magazine for “the best English-language book of fiction on a Jewish theme;” Anna in the Afterlife, chosen by the Los Angeles Times as a “Best Novel of 2002;” and King of the World, which won the Pushcart Editors’ Book Award. Her awards include an O. Henry Award, a Best American Essays award, and a Wallace Stegner fiction fellowship to Stanford University. She retired in 2020 after teaching writing at the California Institute of Technology for thirty-two years. Her literary archive is housed at the Yale Beinecke rare books library.

I recently had the pleasure of talking with Merrill about the title story from her new book Someone Should Know This Story, as well as about humor, fictionalizing family stories, and how her writing has evolved over time.

Michelle Ross: One of this story’s pleasures, Merrill, is the voice. Janet is at an age at which she’s teeter-tottering between childhood and adulthood. Upon her first time meeting Ravi, Janet thrills at the way he looks at her. At the story’s end, she’s delighting in her father pushing her on a swing. Would you talk about the delicate balance of capturing this age?

Merrill Joan Gerber: Most young girls, as they grow from children into young women, have a similar experience to the girl I call Janet in “Someone Should Know This Story.” While in the safe confines of one’s childhood home, a moment comes when there is an opportunity for a girl to step into another and more frightening world. Some girls are more than ready to say yes when that day arrives, but others step back with relief into their predictable and safe lives.

Fourteen-year-old Janet already knows that when she accepts Ava’s invitation, Carolyn will push and shove her about but also that she will see the man she calls “Uncle Herbert” who once wanted to marry her mother. She feels the temptation to learn more about this other family which lives in a high-rise building in Manhattan so different from her own little house in Brooklyn where her dog runs around the yard in circles.

As soon as they are on their way, as Janet feels choked by Ava’s cigarette smoke, she begins to wish she had stayed home. On the one hand, she privately defends her mother who never dresses in a fashionable way, but, on the other, she envies Ava who knows exactly how to dress and conduct a rich woman’s life.

At the New York apartment, Janet faces several challenges, especially when she discovers the handsome Prince who lives secretly in the family’s apartment. Yet she still is not sure where the family’s bathroom is—she doesn’t want to make a mistake and enter his door by accident—and she wishes she were at home again. She yearns to call her father to come and get her. When finally, after she has many new experiences there, she does escape the grown-up world and is rescued when Herbert drives her home. Seeing her dog in the front yard, she runs to the backyard where her father is trimming a tree. Asking her if she is glad to be home, he gives her a push skyward on the family swing and she is once again loved, protected and safe in her childhood space.

I have been interested in conflicts in stories such as this. In another story in my new collection there is one called “Tabu” in which a young girl is invited to a birthday party which she knows will be dangerous for her to attend, yet she wants to make her way from her home, across the street, during a snow storm, to face the challenge. During a kissing game at the party, she is assaulted by an angry boy and finds a way to take her revenge. She returns home, proudly, and with confidence in her ability to handle herself.

MR: Another of this story’s pleasures is the way in which you resist the urge to try to explain things, not even through Janet speculating as to why her mother refused Herbert’s proposal or as to why her mother married her father. Would you talk about that choice?

MJG: Rather than describe or simply state certain facts about a story, I prefer to reveal the details by indirection—just as in that famous rule we learn in school, “show don’t tell.” The reader learns the facts as Janet unveils them.Janet has no doubts about why her mother married her father since she already knows him to be the wonderful man she loves. Yet she is also aware that the book by Shakespeare in the bookcase at home was given to her mother by Herbert and not by her father.

Her father, in his strength and virility, compared to Herbert in his weakness, wins any contest between them. Though her mother “has no diamonds now,” her mother has her father.

MR: There’s a lot of humor in this story. One of my favorite moments is the exchange between Janet and Ava regarding Ava’s dog—that he will not hurt Janet as long as she doesn’t provoke him, which turns out to mean simply going near him. Another is Herbert’s remembered proposal to Janet’s mother. He tells Janet that he said to her mother, “Here, your future is in this little box.” It’s an ouch line, all the more painful and funny because he’s reporting this many years later, seemingly without any reconsideration. What kinds of things make you laugh?  

MJG: I don’t know that any of the humor in my work is the laugh-out-loud kind, but using irony or even cynicism can also be funny. When Janet recognizes that her friend Carolyn has a little puppet set in her room, she is privately revealing her opinion that she has superior intelligence because she has already read many of the Nancy Drew mysteries. When she hears Ava ordering food on the phone, she later asks Caroline, “What are bon bons?” and in a way she is making fun of their super rich lifestyle. Not laughter, but perhaps a satisfied smirk of satisfaction.

MR: You talk in the introduction to this book about a number of your stories being inspired by your mother’s life. I’m guessing this may be one of them, given that Janet’s mother’s name is Anna. I’m curious about that drive and that choice to write about your mother’s life through fiction. And is this something you and she ever discussed?

MJG: In a way my mother has been a constant companion in my work since the earliest days of my life. Another such story in my collection is called “A Daughter of My Own.” In the introduction to my book, I discuss that I was just about to have my first baby when I learned that I had won a Wallace Stegner Writing Fellowship to Stanford University. When our new little family got to Stanford with our 4-month-old daughter, I wrote a story about the conflict I had just had with my mother, who came to help with the new baby. She helped too much. She didn’t want me to nurse the baby but offered to give her a bottle. She didn’t want me to hold the crying baby but offered to take her away so I could sleep. Finally, I asked her to let us have some privacy! She left early, pretending to be getting a cold. Thus, at Stanford, still feeling guilt and grief about how I had treated her, I wrote the story in a fever of remorse. I sent it to Redbook. They bought it! They paid me $1,000. I then realized it would be in every supermarket, and my mother would somehow learn of it. After it was published it, I sent her the money from the story! I apologized. My mother told me how proud she was of me, and that I was free to write whatever inspired me. That she loved me always.

Many of my stories were based on my mother’s life, especially in her last years. Two of my books, Anna in Chains and Anna in the Afterlife, were about the iterations of her life as an old woman living on her own after my father’s death, later living in a retirement place, and finally, dying in a nursing home. When I wrote my memoir, Old Mother, Little Cat, I brought the book to my mother in the nursing home and told her how much I loved her. When in 1997 I was awarded a medal from the University of Florida as “a woman of outstanding achievement,” I brought the medal to my mother and hung it around her neck long enough to take a picture of her wearing it. I owe my mother my life.

MR: This book collects stories you’ve written over many decades. Would you talk about the process of selecting and ordering these stories? What kinds of considerations did you make?

MJG: When I chose the stories for my new book, I reread most of the 127 published stories I had written. I tried to choose stories from various times of my life. When I was raising my three young daughters, I wrote many stories which Redbook published. In all, they bought 42 of my stories, which was a record. I chose only two of these to be in my new book, for there were many different stories I wanted to include. Other stories were taken from my college years (five, including grad school), my married years (my husband and I are married now 66 years), my teaching years (I taught for 32 years at the California Institute of Technology).  I, of course, drew from my family history, including the stories in my novels The Kingdom of Brooklyn and The Victory Gardens of Brooklyn.

MR: How has your relationship to writing changed over the years? Your writing habits? Your subject matter?

MJG: In my earliest days I wanted to write only fiction but as time passed, I wanted to explore some other areas of my experience. After I accompanied my husband to Florence, Italy, where he taught for a term in the Studies Abroad program of his college, I wrote a book called Botticelli Blue Skies: An American in Florence. I wanted to write more about my own direct experience and not through the veil of fiction, so I began to write essays. One, published in The Sewanee Review, “Revelation at the Food Bank,” was chosen to be included in The Best American Essays 2023, and later became the title of my book of essays, also published in 2023.

MR: You’ve taught writing for many years. What are some of the pieces of writing advice you have found yourself giving again and again? And have you found that you have sometimes needed to remind yourself of that same advice?

MJG: What writing advice have I given myself? I have almost written instinctively since I was a child. I learned what grammar I knew from reading books since I was very young. (My father, who was an antique dealer, sometimes brought home big boxes of books. He offered them to me. I would arrange the ones I most wanted to read at the bottom of the pile, like books by Albert Payson Terhune, or Nancy Drew books. Above them I piled more mysterious books—on growing plants, or caring for dogs, or curing diseases. Thus, I encountered a wide range of writing and subjects.)

I had become, without knowing it, a writer of “realistic fiction,” meaning I was most interested in human experience, my own and others. I never could relate to science fiction, or to fantasy books. I suppose I was a follower of the idea, “Write what you know.” Not literally, of course, because writing is a combination of truth, magic, hope, philosophy, fury, poetry, and imagination.

Interviewer Bio:

Michelle Ross is the author of four books, most recently Don’t Take This the Wrong Way (EastOver Press), which she co-authored with Kim Magowan. Her fifth book, Squash, is forthcoming from Moon City Press in 2027. Her fiction has been awarded a Pushcart Prize, the Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction, and other prizes. Her work has been anthologized in the North Anthology Flash Fiction America; Best Small Fictions 2021 and 2023 (in which it was one of ten spotlighted stories); and Best Microfiction 2020, 2021, 2023, 2024, and 2026. She’s an editor at 100 Word Story.