There’s a brilliant slime of technology here, in a story about a miserable widow and the commodification of memories. Saunders’ descriptions ooze and the characters are full-hearted and hazy at their edges, bleeding slightly into the world around them and their narrator, who is keen to love but not skilled at it. The ending is a sly wallop — like falling asleep in a bath, only waking up when you slide in too far.
First published in The New Yorker, September 27, 1992. Collected in CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, Random House, 1996. Read online here
A Personal Anthology 