Ah, the voice! The pace! The concision! A whole childhood and burgeoning adolescence, plus a mother-daughter relationship, plus all the eyes of the neighbourhood, plus the wider system, is packed into just a couple of pages. It’s a forerunner of so many of those “rules for” or “instructions for” stories, but without any of the coy fluff they often have. It just kicks arse.
First published in The New Yorker, 19 June 1978. Collected in At the Bottom of the River, FSG, 1983
